With all the recent BlackBerry network outages, I thought it might be a good time to sit back and reflect on how reliable the BlackBerry actually is, what a reasonable expectation of reliability should be, and also to address the criticism some people have that RIM isn’t doing enough to notify people of outages.

The first statement to be made when discussing reliability of modern day technology is an obvious one, but it needs to be said: “Nothing is 100% reliable.” Later I’ll be discussing in more detail why this is the case and also how this is exactly the trade-off that the market has had to make to bring you what you want at a price you can afford. For now however, it’s important to keep this little tidbit of information always in the back of your mind.