The Blackberry Crumble (with a hint of Apple)

So, if you’ve checked the internet in the last few days, you might have noticed that Blackberry’s systems were DOWN. Not only that, but what seemed to be a fleeting problem turned into a massive disaster. Starting with Europe and continuing in America, the BlackBerry crisis of 2011 expanded in a matter of days.

I can tell you this – the systems were down at least since last week. I know it for a fact because I have been unable to register my BB for almost a week now. The first time I went down to T-mobile was on Friday and they said that by the next day the system would probably be up and running, but the problem escalated and in a few days e-mails went missing and apps stopped working across the continent.

I don’t know if I am the only one but the only reason I got a Blackberry was because they were supposed to be reliable and now I feel that I don’t trust the brand as much. Their credibility took a big hit, I would say, counting the number of complaints and sometimes mean jokes and taunts about their failures that rolled on Twitter.

Their blog, website, Twitter accounts and Facebook were updated on Monday morning saying they’ve took notice of the problems and are working on it.

However, it was only today, Thursday, that everything was fixed and Research In Motion (the company that owns BlackBerry) Chief Executive, Mike Lazaridis came out with a video apologizing for the outages and explaining the situation. I appreciate his honesty and I am sure they’re working hard on it but am I the only one who feels this video was supposed to show up somewhere on Monday?

Anyhow, not to worry, Apple wasn’t doing so great today either. Their launch of the new operating system iOS 5 ran into some troubles too and users found themselves faced with an error when trying to download it. However, Apple managed to fix the problem in a matter of hours making its clients happy and so far the OS seems to be well received.

That why the joke today was not only on Blackberry but, for a limited amount of time, also on Apple. So in honor of all the tweets that said there was going to be an Blackberry-Apple-Crumble headline, here is mine.

-PS. If you read so far, go ahead and treat yourself with a funny little BBC sketch on this whole Apple and BlackBerry situation-

Royal Spoof

In advertising, you have to know when to ride the trends, and right now it’s all about the Royal wedding. This is why I feel I should applaud T-mobile for their clever use of the opportunity. Because of their slogan, ‘Life’s for sharing’, this wedding scenario fitted in perfectly with their message. That was because of two reasons, first, William and Kate are now creating a life together and, secondly, the wedding is covered on a huge number of television channels and it’s generally everywhere, therefore shared with everyone else too.

The advert is not especially well made, you can see it’s a spoof, not even extremely funny, i would say, but perfectly on topic. Even though I didn’t consider it to be hilarious (except for their choice of music), apparently Prince Harry liked it and has also posted it on his Facebook page telling people that it’s a taste of  ’what to expect’  from his brother’s wedding day. Of course this provided heavy coverage for the advert in the newspapers as well as online.

You can see the advert here and tell me what you think about it