The National:

The Telecommunications Regulatory Authority has said that Blackberry Messenger, Blackberry E-mail and Blackberry Web-browsing services in the UAE will be suspended as of October 11. The suspension is a result of the failure of ongoing attempts, dating back to 2007, to bring Blackberry services in the UAE in line with UAE telecommunications regulations.

Oh, brilliant. Coming hot at the heels of this news where they were “clear” that “we don’t have plans to stop them” by the TRA Spokesperson, this is starting to get ridiculous. As such, we have issues with Skype, and restrictions over everything else. All the 20 years of building free zones and all that fun stuff to bring businesses to the UAE comes to nought if you’re not going to let businesses communicate.

Yes yes, they’ll either then announce, “Oh it was a misunderstanding,” or the even better, “Look BlackBerry caved and we found a solution” memo before the deadline. But still, this is a huge issue for businesses. It leaves an unsettling doubt. Not a good sign. The right way would have been to give BlackBerry the deadline, sort out the issue, announce that you’re working with RIM and then announce it when you have a solution. Golly, I don’t even work in PR.

I’m an iPhone lover myself, but one thing’s certain, businesses run on BlackBerry. Plus, after hearing this, the iPhone or the Android are hardly out of danger, are they? I can already see the announcement: “We don’t like their App Store/Marketplace.”