BlackBerries To Be Gimped In The United Arab Emirates

John Brownlee ()

BlackBerries To Be Gimped In The United Arab Emirates

If you’re a BlackBerry warrior who does business in the futuristic desert city of Dubai, it’s about time to consider switching to an iPhone: the telecommunications authority in the United Arab Emirates will be blocking some BlackBerry services come October.

The issue is one of government surveillance. BlackBerries send encrypted data to oversea servers through their own messaging layer, which means that local authorities can’t read that data. The iPhone doesn’t handle messaging, e-mail and the web in the same fashion, making it exempt from the UAE’s criticisms.

Research in Motion has garnered official criticism due to its encryption scheme before. India also threatened to ban Blackberries at a certain point, prompting RIM to ultimately cave on their position. That’s less likely to happen in the UAE: it’s the difference between a potential subscriber base of a billion and a hundred million.

DON'T MISS
Feds Ditch BlackBerry for iPhone. Will Obama Be Next?

You can view this story in one of two ways as an iPhone owner. On the one hand, if you go to the UAE with your iPhone, the government at least wants the option of snooping on you. On the other hand, at least you can use its full array of services while you’re there… an option that now appears to be completely off the table for BlackBerry owners.

5 comments »

About the author

John BrownleeJohn Brownlee is news editor here at Cult of Mac, and has also written about a lot of things for a lot of different places, including Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, Gizmodo, Kotaku, Lifehacker, AMC, Geek and the Consumerist. He lives in Cambridge with his charming inamorata and a tiny budgerigar punningly christened after Nabokov's most famous pervert. You can follow him here on Twitter.

(sorry, you need Javascript to see this e-mail address)| Read more posts by .

Posted in iPhone, News |

  • ahmed al-khuzae

    and im so happy
    if u so live in dubai u would share my happines
    there are more blackberries here than anywhere in the world im sure
    like our class of 23 student had 18 blackberries it is crazy

    im so happy it is over

  • Porkchop1234

    Hey Ahmed. Tell your king and his cronies that what someone does on his blackberry isn’t his or anyone elses business. I hope the whole industry jumps all over this and boycotts selling smartphones in Saudia Arabia. I wonder what his majesty would think once he realized his country has been blacklisted by the mobile tech industry.

  • Grover

    Maybe if they dressed the BlackBerry in a hijab, it would be acceptable again?

  • king

    @porkchop1234

    If they decide to boycott Saudia Arabia, its a choice
    but then Saudia Arabia would buy all smart phone companies and make smart phones Saudia exclusive,
    they are that rich

  • NewJohnny

    You people are so full of fail.
    1st– it’s Saudi, not Saudia.
    2nd– Saudi Arabia is an entirely different country to the southwest of UAE.
    3rd– most any Blackberry user will tell you how much they love their Blackberry and would not switch to an iphone. It’s the keyboard. International business travelers will just use a “UAE” temp phone (probably android for the hardware keyboard).