More or less same problem is being faced by the BlackBerry users since Monday. BlackBerry users have been left furious after their internet service crashed Monday morning, with outages touching subscribers in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. Communications and social networking tools, including the email,Internet, Twitter, BlackBerry Messenger, and Facebook, were unable to process data from around 11am and the problem persists. Outage is reported to spread across Brazil, Chile and Argentina on Tuesday being the latest headache for the Canadian based Research in Motion (RIM).

RIM assured later on Monday that all services had been restored to users; however the root cause of the problem was still unknown. It took nearly 20 hours to restore the services, but within a few hours after restoration, the services collapsed again; causing problems to the users, many of whom solely rely on it for their business communications.

‘We are working to restore normal service as quickly as possible. We apologize for any inconvenience it has caused’, said RIM in an email statement.

No need to mention RIM’s BlackBerry services has long been awarded by executives and politicians who rely on its security parameters to deliver email and other messaging to mobile personnel. “The current situation with the BlackBerry outages couldn’t come at a worse time for RIM, following some harsh criticism in recent months,” Informa Telecoms & Media analyst, Malik Saadi, said in a statement. RIM has struggled this year with fewer sales of the BlackBerry against rivals like Apple’s iPhone, various models from HTC, and other handsets powered by Google’s Android OS.

In the August blog we mentioned that as far as RIM’s BlackBerry is concerned, we noticed progressive trends that have made us go for creating a FriendCaller App for BlackBerry, therefore we certainly don’t want this outage to affect us in future. We hope RIM gets success in resolving the problem at their latest.

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Amazon has done it again! Internet world is buzzing with all kinds of news and updates about Amazon’s much awaited Kindle Fire tablet and now we know why? It’s handy, it’s cool and it’s affordable. With so many exciting features and apps to choose from and an Android-powered OS at an economical price of just $199 as compared to $499 Apple’s iPad, who wouldn’t want to grab it? It’s simply perfect!

Since, we are already in the BETA testing phase for our soon-to-be launched Video Calling feature on FriendCaller for Android app; we were concerned about the presence of a camera in the Amazon Kindle Fire. Well, here comes the good news! Looks like it does have a camera and Video Calling might be a possibility, pretty awesome!

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Status History of AWS EU-West-1

Having said this, it it the second time we have been hit hard by Amazon services outages and I watch the AWS service dashboard with the same fear as the stock market. One shock after another. First Amazon EC2 in Ireland went down and took our corporate email server with it. They manage to damage the database as well…This was Sunday and Amazon is still working on the recovery. Ouch! The updates provided by Amazon do not provide an easy reading, same as our first outage. Is basically the same story “We were prepared but it did not work when put to the test“

Status History of AWS 8th August

Then, ECS on North Virgina went down. Our quality management tool picked this up before Amazon noticed and we can not loose North Virginia as most of our US traffic is managed from there. Luckily, AWS could recover before we had to shift the instances across the country to California. This time the service was impacted only for 15 minutes or so but for me, the incidents took the concept of “elastic” to another test and there is no clear winner.

I really hope Amazon goes back and works on its back up solutions, It is a great service but these interruptions that can last for days are serious.

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We must, however, take a moment to ponder the reality in the great disparities between the high-end smart phone devices and the low-priced Android devices. Essentially, Android is the mobile OS for the masses. Gartner’s recent, and widely cited report on the mobile devices market, found that Android now dominates with 36% market share, twice that of Apple’s iOS.

For a long time, it seemed as if every day, a new Android mobile phone was being announced. Now it is the Android tablet that is making its debut virtually everywhere. HTC, Acer, Panasonic, Lenovo, Samsung, Asus, Motorola, RIM and many other major manufacturers are bringing Android-based tablets to market. Huawei just introduced a new Android tablet, dubbed the MediaPad, the first 7-inch tablet supporting Android 3.2. Even Amazon has expressed interest in entering the Android tablet market, which makes sense, because it already has its own app store for Android apps.

This level of competition among Android tablet manufacturers is a good thing for consumers, and has resulted in the availability of a wide range of devices designed to meet virtually any unique style or preferences. As an added bonus for consumers, the prices of the Android tablets will undoubtedly fall quickly, due to this increased competition and widespread availability.

FriendCaller’s Android VoIP app is consistently being updated to meet the requirements of these new devices. We have been paying particular attention to the needs of the various Android tablets, and thus have optimized the app to align with the wide selection of features that are currently available.

Our latest version has a completely new audio engine that has been substantially improved from Android 2.3, and now provides echo cancellation and noise reduction. Additionally, our social features are constantly being optimized, supporting an improved friend finder, and now friend suggestions.

Do you already have FriendCaller on your Android device? Get the update! If not, download the app today! We offer an easy to follow start-up guide for all new FriendCaller users.

If you have already installed and tested the new version, let us know if you used it on your Android tablet. We welcome your feedback!

With the launch of the new Amazon AppStore, and the Google Android Marketplace (web version), we have determined that our Android application is becoming popular quite rapidly, and is receiving high number of daily downloads, hence, we have once again worked out everything on the app to create a more interactive experience for you.

In addition to the numerous improvements made to the user interface and the optimization of various functions, there are a few features that require an honorable mention.

First, of course, the new awesome design. Yes, the Android app also shines with the new FriendCaller deep soothing colors. Besides the interface, the Facebook integration has gotten further improved and now pictures of friends are shown in the contact detail view. This does only work for friends who also have a Facebook account with picture, but also for friends who doesn’t. You can now see pictures of your friends who are already connected with Facebook connect, and a standard picture of those who are not. This makes easy for you to find your friends in the contact list view and click them to call instantly.

In past, we have pointed out on several occasions in our blog posts, that we will also bring some new exciting features to our Android app just like our famous iPhone application have. Therefore, it was finally a time to integrate the well-known Offer Wall, which gives you the option to earn free credits by simply downloading other free Android apps.

Furthermore, another major new change, which you will surely experience in the new Android version is the new contact list. Friends and Contacts are now fully merged in to a single easy to access contact list. The old contacts list of separate friends and contacts does not exists anymore. Also the speed dial feature is now fully available. Now a slider pops up from the bottom showing all the phone numbers from a contact you tapped on before.
Not to forget, since there is always a room for more improvement, we are delighted to present you with the new contact management feature, in which if you tap and hold on a particular contact for some time, a dialog will pop up with three of the following choices:

1. View details → opens the detail view for the selected contact
2. Arrange in groups → will sort the contacts by their online status
3. Arrange alphabetically → will sort the contacts in an alphabetic order

Summarizing, you will definitely discover many more new things besides some of the major ones mentioned above. So download or update your Android with the new FriendCaller app for Android and experience the best VoIP calling app in the market. Now you can make FREE calls via voice over IP to landline and mobiles worldwide, by using the Offer Wall to earn free credits.

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More worrying, the information coming from Amazon shows lot of similarities to the updates provided by Japan authorities about the failing of the nuclear power plant’s failing cooling systems. I call for a implementation of a cloud disaster scale, are we having a 5 or is this a 6 already? Didn’t we always told about the robust nature of AWS cloud hosting, sound familiar as well.

However, language is the only similarity to the tragedy in Japan. No life is lost in our disaster experience. Since the service is down, maybe is good time to read a book. Our recommendation today is a book from Jeff Howe. And No! It is not available on the Kindle online store:

Today I tried again and Heureka! Amazon.com: Appstore for Android showed up, at last. Still not as first search result, but around second to fifth. Taking a closer look it becomes clear why: The link is using www.amazon.com/mobile-apps/ instead of www.amazon.com/appstore/. I assume this choice is related to Apple’s legal case against Amazon’s use of the word “Appstore”. So it took the mighty search engines a day or two longer to index the store despite the great press coverage.

How FriendCaller is doing on Amazon’s Appstore for Android? Searching in communication for “VoIP” we are No. 1.  So far we have seen no particular increase in downloads. Let’s see, right now it is still fairly complicated to download and install Android apps from Amazon and this limited to the US only.

In combination with Amazon’s check out payment solution it could create a success story. We have been critical of the Google Android Market for the poor presentation of the apps and the lack of payment solutions. Both issues have somewhat improved but the store is still very limited and improvements are not available to all users.

Amazon could make a real difference with a solid track record of sales, digital download experience from Kindle ebooks, Amazon Webhosting and the payment solutions. So far, so good. Our app have been approved for some time and will be found online once the store becomes available here.

However, why we have to learn about the exact start date from techcrunch and not from Amazon is a question only Amazon can answer. Right now we can not be sure either if our FriendCaller app can be used through the test drive feature either. Most likely not since our VoIP app needs access to the system microphone and speaker.

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Digital books are on the increase according to the business figures Amazon published. The world largest retailer sells meanwhile more E-Books than hardcovers. In the last month Amazon sold on 100 regular books 180 E-Books.  This led to triple business numbers of E-Books at the turn of the half-year 2010.

Amazon did not mention absolute numbers, but reinforced their own statistics with information of the Association of American Publishers, whereby the sale of E-Books increased by 207 percent in the annual comparison.

Chief executive Jeff Bezos cites the price cutting of the own brand E-Book Reader as ones reason.

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Can you hear the whisper?

I have been eyeing the Amazon Kindle DX for some time. I like to read, but getting English books while I am abroad is quite troublesome at many places. I must say that I like the idea of Kindle downloading your books through WiFi or UMTS/3G mobile data by utilizing its Amazon Whispernet. Howsoever, when the wireless feature was announced I was thinking of apps that could run on it, as no matter what, the DX is a decent tablet PC, just short of the color display though. Rephrasing, its indeed an ideal device for VoIP. And Amazon did a pretty good negotiation on roaming Charges: 1 Mega Byte of transfer overseas costs only 99 cents versus the big 20 dollars that a US AT&T Apple iPhone user would have to pay when roaming like in Germany for an example.

When we learned today that Amazon will soon launch a developer kit I immediately looked it up, and what a disappointment it was. The first reference to the not allowed features was the Voice over IP functionality. Sorry guys, no web-phone, no browser phone, no free calls. I guess I will be heading to my usual book store as usual.

The Whispernet is rather a Silentnet. Hence, Kindle does not whisper!

Image: Yaron Jeroen van Oostrom

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