The United Arab Emirates will no longer go ahead with its planned BlackBerry ban, the federation's Telecommunications Regulatory Authority said on Friday. The regulator acknowledged RIM's cooperation in the matter but didn't say whether it can monitor messages sent from BlackBerry handsets, as previously planned.
BlackBerry users in the United Arab Emirates are not giving up their handsets, despite facing a suspension of services if the government and Research In Motion do not come to an agreement. According to a Tuesday report, nearly all of the some 500,000 subscribers believe a deal will be reached by their retention of the service. Etisalat, the country's BlackBerry provider, says they have not seen a decrease in their subscriber count.
Nearly 145,000 BlackBerry users in the United Arab Emirates got a text message from the country's provider, Etisalat, urging them to download an update that promised to boost performance recently. Instead, the update allegedly led to operating system crashes and drastically reduced battery life and could allow unauthorized access to private information stored on users' devices, including e-mails, according to a Tuesday BBC report. RIM, the maker of BlackBerry handsets, made a statement saying it had nothing to do with such an update and it was not authorized, developed or tested by the company.
A report from Business 24/7 today that the iPhone will launch in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates may also provide a clue as to the next iPhone launch. Dow Jones tells the newspaper that Emirates Telecommunications - etisalat now expects to offer the iPhone 3G in the two countries on February 15th but also claims that the next-generation iPhone will arrive in June, shipping "at the same time" in the UAE as in other countries.
