Showing its age

Earlier this week, a service outage left two-thirds of Blackberry's 12 million North American subscribers with spotty or non-existent access to wireless email.

Research in Motion blamed a problem on the upgrade of a data routing system. The upgrade was part of an effort to expand capacity for long-term growth.

But the outage was the second in less than a year for RIM in North America, its most important market. The first outage occurred in April.

Undependable service could tarnish Blackberry's status as the professional handheld of choice. This weakness could become an opportunity for Apple's iPhone, which is eyeing the market like a hungry animal.

Research Capital analyst Nick Agostino told Reuters that in previous years, there was "relatively little" disruption to RIM's service, which is used by executives, politicians, lawyers and other professionals to send secure e-mail.

iPhone recently added an email client to its platform.