For anyone who thinks RIM may be a value stock, I give you these sage words of advice from Admiral Ackbar in “Return of the Jedi”: “It’s a trap!” There is no sugarcoating RIM’s latest earnings report. The company warned that sales and profits for the next quarter will be far below already reduced forecasts. It also announced that its new BlackBerry 10 smartphones, trumpeted as the company’s savior, have been delayed until the end of 2012. That’s an eon in the fast-moving consumer tech world. That’s why the stock plunged 12% Friday morning. Shares are now down 77% year-to-date and are trading at their lowest level since January 2004. The company can’t afford to be Research in Slow Motion at a time when it is facing brutal competition from Apple (AAPL, Fortune 500) and from handset makers like Samsung and HTC that have latched themselves to Google’s (GOOG, Fortune 500) Android wagon. Even Nokia (NOK), thanks to an alliance with Microsoft (MSFT, Fortune 500), is a threat. BlackBerry: Looks like ‘game over’ for RIM – The Buzz – Dec. 16,...

The handset itself is just a rectangle with a large screen (there’s no sight of a “crackberry” keyboard). Outside of the sleek and polished user interface that we’ve never seen before, the overall design looks a little too basic to be real. Perhaps it’s just to get the development wheels turning. In the videos, however, the unassuming device is doing pretty cool stuff like interacting seamlessly with computers, tablets, and a smart table. One woman even uses it to find her desk in a cubicle farm while her colleague uses it to gain access to a room. Read more: http://www.cnet.com/8301-17918_1-20126720-85/leaked-blackberry-videos-promise-big-changes/#ixzz1c3NBU4Ap Leaked BlackBerry videos promise big changes | Dialed In – CNET...

A widespread service outage wouldn’t bode well for any service provider, but it has got to sting a little extra for RIM. This isn’t the first time that there has been a BlackBerry service outage in North America. To boot, with the iPhone 4S, a huge competitor for everyone, but specifically the flailing, increasingly aimless BlackBerry, this outage could hardly come at a worse time, especially when more and more businesses are abandoning RIM’s proprietary, secure email for alternatives that let employees use phones like the iPhone for work.  BlackBerry Black Out Spreads To North America | Geekosystem. Oh RIM…how much longer will you be able to hold on? It’s one thing to keep releasing products to “compete” with Apple and Android…and quite another to research and develop other sorts of technology you can lead in…perhaps you should do the...