The iPhone Blog’s Rene Ritchie checks out the new BlackBerry Platform using the  Storm 2 and Bold 9700.  A CrackBerry Staff member is along for the review to give CPR and explain a few of the upgrades on the featured models and OS.

This review is part of the Smartphone Round Robin , a six week period where product specific smartphone expert editors review phones from Rival Platforms.

Blackberry Users have experienced two major service disruptions in the past 2 weeks.   A majority of the disruptions came Tuesday evening, causing BlackBerry Users on Twitter and other social networking services to voice their frustrations.  These most recent issues follow a service outage to BlackBerry business clients less than one week earlier.

Problems included not being able to access email or internet services.  The service problems break RIMM’s nearly perfect record for the past 12 months.  RIMM blames software problems with the new BlackBerry Messenger and strongly encourage users to upgrade to a third version just released by the company.

Cnet Reporter Brooke Crothers takes both his BlackBerry Storm and iPhone 3GS into the California desert and reports about coverage qualities.

Verizon comes out ahead while AT&T had reported signal loss -  Read the Report.

The BlackBerry Pearl 3G appears to be a solid phone from RIMM.   A smaller version of the Storm 2, the phone boosts some new feautres that should make Pearl users happy.

We’d love to hear some feedback from anyone who is using this phone.

Stop calling people from your pants!  Pocket Dialing not only wastes energy and time, it also is just plain annoying!  Stupid phone user!

To avoid these embarrassing accidents, simply press the silver key on the very top of your phone until you get the “Entering Standby Mode”.

The next time you need to do something, the phone will remind you about it’s standby state, then will instruct you to again press the silver mute key on top of the phone to exit standby mode.