Bye Bye BlackBerry?

OTTAWA--What if your BlackBerry screen went dark?

To executives like Douglas Steenland of Northwest Airlines, the idea of doing business without a BlackBerry is about as appealing as reverting to rotary dial phones and Telex machines.

"It's the proverbial blessing and curse," Steenland said of his BlackBerry, which sends e-mail messages wirelessly. "It's a blessing because it liberates you from the office. It's a curse because there's no escape."

That is why there was so much anxiety throughout corporate America over this week's news that a long-running patent infringement battle between the maker of BlackBerry, Research in Motion, and NTP, a tiny patent holding company, might cause a service shutdown, perhaps within a month.

Indeed, the prospect of life without BlackBerries is so frightening to Northwest--a heavy user if ever there was one--that the airline immediately demanded a conference call with RIM executives and one is scheduled for Tuesday.

"Everybody here hopes that somebody else will fix the problem," said Andrea Newman, Northwest's senior vice president for government relations. "But no one really knows what the problem is or what it will take to fix it."

RIM, which is based in Waterloo, Ontario, promises it has a solution that will keep its beloved BlackBerries humming even in the face of an injunction. While most analysts view the prospects of a shutdown as unlikely, they have little faith in the proposed solution, which has potential legal pitfalls of its own. What's more, the history of the struggle between the companies means that no outcome is certain. (RIM declined to comment.)

In an interview early this year and more recently at an investors' conference in New York, James Balsillie, the chairman and co-chief executive, said that the company had developed a new software technology that did not infringe on NTP's patents and would provide a way to escape any injunction.

RIM has offered little additional information about its new system other than to say that switching over to it would not require subscribers to acquire new devices or to alter their current units.

"On this subject they seem to have an attitude that they wish that people would stop talking about it," said Kenneth Hyers, a wireless research analyst with ABI Research who is based in Raleigh, N.C. The company briefed Hyers this week, he said, and indicated only in broad terms that the software modifications would be made at a network level.

"That begs the question, 'If they've been sitting on this all this time, why haven't they implemented it?'" he said. "Their answer is that this is a major network upgrade and nobody wants to mess with the network if they don't have to."

That, Hyers added, suggests that installing the software will not be as easy as RIM suggested.

While the change, if it is made, will not require any action by subscribers, it's not clear if it will alter how the BlackBerry e-mail service operates.

Balsillie has said that the new system has been tested with focus groups but he offered no details.

Any changes to the experience of users, said Avi Greengart, the principal mobile devices analyst at Current Analysis in Sterling, Va., could undermine a chief reason for BlackBerry's success. There are 3.65 million BlackBerry users worldwide.

"You now have a very nice, seamless e-mail experience with BlackBerry," Greengart said. "If you want to do just voice and e-mail, it's hard to beat a BlackBerry."

There is one party who says he knows the details of the change but who also has a vested interest in the case. Donald Stout, the patent lawyer who is a co-founder of NTP of Arlington, Va., said RIM showed him its alternative system.

While he formally agreed not to disclose its details, Stout said