Besides being of questionable legality, there are a number of common sense problems here.

For one, while BlackBerry may have been the preferred communication device among protesters, news of and plans for riots largely spread to Twitter and more public channels. Public channels that police could easily monitor to determine where outbreaks of violence might occur next, to better coordinate their efforts. Even on BlackBerry’s network, there’s nothing to suggest that police who may have had BlackBery devices themselves were banned or restricted from accessing more open forum posts, or submitting their own numbers to organizers looking to rally as many people as they could.

The most secure BlackBerry messages – ones with end-to-end encryption are typically not even available to users not on the type of enterprise plan normally used by large companies and government. {Deutsch Welle} So if everyone else is sending messages that can be unencrypted by any other BlackBerry device, would it not make more sense to simply buy the police department a few BlackBerry handsets so that they could monitor chatter on the network?

That’s to say nothing of more open networks like Twitter or Facebook, who are also coming under fire.

So instead of oh, say, putting a few tech savvy officers on the networks to create profiles, and monitor and potentially engage people suspected of plotting criminal activity, you instead shut down their profiles, forcing them to move to secondary accounts which are further under the radar, or onto methods that are more difficult to monitor, like in person conversations.

Then you not only have plots that are more difficult to trace, but less evidence to actually prosecute people with as well.

Brilliant.

Say what you will about their ethics, but maybe we should get News Corp. on this – they seem to be the one London organization who can figure out how to monitor a person and gather information. A group of anonymous UK residents (ex-News of the World?) created Zavilia.com, a site that uses Facebook to get photos of rioters, and has crowd sourced identification of people in the pictures. Once multiple IDs come in on the same person, the name is forwarded to police. Some particularly bold rioters are posting photos of themselves with their loot on social networks, sites where they can sell the merchandise and doing other things online that are easily traceable and identifiable. All this to say that if a random developer with a few spare hours can figure out how to use social media to identify and potentially stop looters, fame seeking criminals with more braggadocio than criminal genius are openly posting photos, surely the entire UK government can figure out how to prevent and prosecute crimes with the help of social media, not in spite of it.

While there is a real need to review the plans for dealing with sudden and unexpected outbursts of criminal activity, Mr. Cameron’s anti-social media strategy is unlikely to have any real effectiveness within it. BBMs don’t cause criminal activity, for all the credit they’ve received, neither Twitter or Facebook caused revolutions. They may facilitate the planning, but for both good and bad, killing a communication method doesn’t kill the spirit behind the messages.

Over the weekend, protesters in London turned out to show their opposition to the shooting of Mark Duggan by armed police. In London, unlike the vast majority of the United States, not all police officers carry guns. Duggan was a passenger in a livery cab when police made a pre-organized stop of the car to arrest Duggan. Details are still emerging, but initial reports from investigators pointed to an exchange of gunfire. At the end, Duggan was dead. To date, none of the investigating agencies have confirmed that Duggan fired the weapon he was allegedly carrying at police.

Protests were organized in response, and while a march to the Tottenham police station (near the scene of the shooting) started peacefully, it eventually devolved into violent riots. While Twitter was initially credited with helping to spread the unrest, newspapers and tech blogs are suggesting that the BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) service actually had more of a role, thanks to the privacy of messages exchanged on the network and its popularity with young people. {TechCrunch Europe}

How did a phone which early adopters have abandoned for iPhones or Androids, with a network that’s rarely mentioned in the same breath as ones like Twitter become the unofficial news and organizational device for working class young people in London?

BBM offers inexpensive chat options between BlackBerry users, which means an option that’s less expensive with more privacy than traditional SMS messages. In other words, some of the same things that initially attracted corporate users.

So it’s not necessarily that BlackBerry has become a sinister network for those plotting riots and criminal acts. There was already something of a trend of the BlackBerry gaining in popularity among young people in London, and for good or bad, BBM is where they knew their friends and updates on the situation would be.

That included some people organizing copycat riots which may have had little in common with the initial protest in Tottenham, even if news spread through the same channel.

Is the Blackberry Torch already going up in flames?

According to a report by the Wall Street Journal, the BlackBerry Torch only managed to sell 150,000 units at launch {Electronista}.  That may seem like a large number, but in terms of handset sales, it’s relatively nothing.  Most Android phones in recent memory have been selling out on day one, and the iPhone 4 sold a million on the first day.  All of those phones had issues with inventory, with phones being sold out for quite some time (sometimes sold out just from pre-orders).  The Torch, on the other hand, has no supply issues, unless stores have more stock of the phone than they planned to have, in which case it could be a bigger problem for RIM.

Along with the unconfirmed sales numbers, there’s another sign that the Torch isn’t doing as well as expected.  Amazon.com has lowered the price of the phone already.  Just five days after the phone went on sale for $199.99, Amazon is selling it for $99.99 with a two-year contract {Engadget}.  It brings the Torch more in line with the mid-range Android phones that have similar (or sometime even better) hardware specs, and a larger app ecosystem.  So if you wanted a Torch, now is a great time to pick one up.

The BlackBerry Torch looks like RIM decided to do it’s own riff on the Palm Pre form factor, and it actually turned out pretty well.  It has a 3.2-inch touchscreen, with the ubiquitous four BlackBerry buttons and trackpad beneath it.  The introduction of the trackpad makes it obvious RIM is moving away from the ill-fated Storm and it’s ridiculous click-screen.  Instead, the Torch has a normal multi-touch capacitive touchscreen.  It still has an on-screen keyboard, but RIM knows it’s users prefer it’s great physical keyboard, so it included on that slides beneath the screen.

With the Torch, RIM is happy to tout the Universal Search available in BlackBerry 6.  Universal Search will search everything on the phone (email, music, apps, App World) as well as the internet.  RIM has also included a feature not even Apple has been able to figure out yet: wireless syncing of media to devices via WiFi.  In one last innovation in BlackBerry 6, RIM has enabled a two finger tap to select and move multiple items or folders around on the phone.  The browser is finally WebKit-based like the browsers on iOS, Android and WebOS devices.  It also compresses data two to three times normal, which would help keep data usage down.  The downside is it seems there is no way to make the browser fool websites into thinking it’s a desktop browser, which would keep many sites to the stripped-down mobile versions. {PC Mag}

For the device itself, while the form factor and OS are exciting, the specs aren’t.  The 3.2-inch screen has a resolution of a measly 480×360, whereas most smartphones now have screens with a resolution of 800×480.  The processor is also lagging behind, running at just 624 MHz compared to the 1 GHz processor in most other flagship smartphones.  Out of the box, the Torch will have 8 GB of storage, 4 GB of built-in storage plus a 4 GB micro SD card which can be replaced with cards of up to 32 GB {Gizmodo}.  That’s a bit of a letdown, and can make the phone lag quite a bit.  Still, it’s not the worst iPhone/Android challenger that RIM could have come up with, and one we wouldn’t mind having some time to play with.

BlackBerry Bold 9700

$49.99 {Amazon}
The BlackBerry Bold 9700 is the most expensive smartphone on this list, at $49.99.  As with most BlackBerrys, the Bold 9700 isn’t terribly exciting.  It has a 2.4-inch screen, and a full QWERTY keyboard, and has the newer trackpad rather than scroll button that’s been met with mixed reactions.  Be forewarned: it will likely be obsolete after the BlackBerry and AT&T press conference on August 3rd, where we’ll hopefully see a phone running the new BlackBerry 6.  But for now, and for under $50, the Bold 9700 is still a pretty good choice.

Motorola Backflip

$0.01 {Amazon}
The Backflip is a strange phone.  You’ve probably seen the advertisements on TV touting the phone’s social networking capability using the Motoblur features.  What isn’t clear is that the phone’s design is a bit… backwards.  When folded closed, the keyboard is directly opposite the touchscreen rathe than sliding underneath the screen like it’s sister phone, the T-Mobile Cliq.  Behind the screen when the keyboard is folded out is a touchpad, with can be a bit confusing to use.  It still runs on Android 1.5, but will be updated to Android 2.1 within a few months.  For those who like to spend a lot of time on social networks, the Backflip is still a good choice.

Can the BlackBerry 6 compete with the iPhone & Android?

Research In Motion, the makers of BlackBerry, realized this a while back, and introduced the first BlackBerry Storm.  Problem is, it wasn’t very good, and the OS didn’t seem to work very well with touchscreens.  Now RIM is showing off BlackBerry 6, the next version of the OS that’s geared toward smartphones, and it actually looks pretty good.  BlackBerry 6 looks to have some social networking built into the OS, making sharing info and finding info through Facebook and Twitter much easier than before.  The web browser is also greatly improved, and will be based on WebKit, the same engine that powers the web browsers in iOS, Android, and WebOS. {Mashable}

BlackBerry 6 is still distinctly a BlackBerry OS, it has a very similar aesthetic, but seems to be a bit closer to WebOS as well.  RIM has a history of potentially exciting products, like the Black Berry Storm, that are ultimately uninteresting or just don’t live up to potential.  That’s not to say BlackBerry 6 and whatever new device touchscreen-centric device might run it will be bad, but it’s enough to be a bit wary.  That being said, the UI is pretty exciting, and possibly the most interesting thing to happen to BlackBerry devices in quite some time.

Borders has been selling e-book readers for a few months now, both the Kobo Reader and the Aluratek Reader which cost $150 and $120, respectively.  The chain has also had iOS apps out for a few weeks now, and along with the e-bookstore is launching apps for Android and BlackBerry devices. {Mashable}

Like Borders’ higher-end e-book reader, the e-bookstore is powered by Kobo.  The store already has 1.5 million books.  That puts it right int he middle of Barnes & Noble, which only has 1 million books available, and smaller than Amazon which boasts more free e-books (1.8 million) than either have in total.  Apple, on the other hand, advertises “tens of thousands” of books in the iBookstore (which excludes popular books like “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo” by Steig Larsson).

Borders hopes to gain 17 percent of the e-book market by July 2011.  That might be possible given that Barnes & Noble was able to get 20 percent of the market in about a year’s time.  Borders is late to the game, however, with readers that look rather pricey given their feature set compared to the recent price slashing that has happened among their peers in the market.  Like Barnes & Noble, Borders does have a retail store to help promote the e-book readers, though the fact that the Kindle is available in Target stores now could put a damper on that.

Competition for eReading consumers†affection sizzled on Monday as Barnes and Noble dropped the price of its well received Nook e-book reader 23 percent to $199 and introduced the Nook WiFi at an even bigger bargain $149, though the latter device can only be used in a WiFi environment. Amazon, whose $259 price tag for their Kindle eReader (which comes with 3G technology by default) previously matched the Nookâ€s cost exactly, responded by dropping the price of the Kindle to $189, and they aren’t stopping their competitive advances there. Amazon.com plans to introduce a thinner Kindle with an upgraded screen this August. Sonyâ€s cheapest eReader is still $169. {Fortune}

Get yourself a price gun: the war for th eReader market is on

At this rate, eReaders will be cheaper than the actual books in their stores in no time.

In addition, Apple updated the iPhone and iPod Touch today to include available iBook software. The iPadâ€s price tag for the entry-level model remains near $500, though the additional tablet computer functionality give it an advantage over single purpose eReaders. It would be difficult to justify a $500 eReader purchase, but when that device doubles as a place to play games, browse the web and check on email, it’s a lot easier to rationalize.
“Their sales have obviously been impacted by the iPad,” Charlie Wolf, a senior analyst at Needham & Co. in New York, said. “These price cuts are almost an act of desperation.” {Bloomberg Businessweek}

Meanwhile, Kobo, the e-book retailer that offers eReading software for an array of devices, released free software on Monday that is available through the Android marketplace and allows eReaders to be used on Smartphones with the Android operating system. The e-book retailer already produces software for other Smartphones, iPad, iPhone, Blackberry, Palm WebOS and the newly released Kobo reading device.

Users who buy Kobo e-books with one device can read their purchase on any of the devices for which Kobo offers software.

“We’ve adapted the features our customers love and expect from Kobo to ensure that we provide the best reading experience for Android-enabled smartphones,” Kobo CEO Michael Serbinis said. {Publishers Weekly}

Borders is also holding steady with eReaders that began selling for $119.99-$149.99 in May. {Bloomberg Businessweek}

Need to catch your breath? We sure do! We canâ€t wait to see which devices prove most popular among consumers and how low the prices will need to go to woo customers who are interested in an e-reading device but not its expense.