In an apparent attempt to keep its workers from feeling tied to their BlackBerry handsets when there are off-duty, Volkswagen (VW) has worked out an agreement under which the post-work BlackBerry use of the unionized workers at company's German sites will be throttled.

The latest worldwide BlackBerry outage that left millions of RIM customers without email or text services could provoke many angry customers to switch over to alternative smartphones.

Angry customers have already flooded Twitter and other social networking sites with complaints against the outage, with some even threatening that they were ready to give up the BlackBerry.

Canadian manufacturer RIM has said that the recent service outages experienced by BlackBerry users around the globe were the result of a core switch failure.

Starting Monday morning, BlackBerry users in Europe, South America, Africa, India and the Middle East were unable to browse Internet and send & receive messages and emails.

An outage at Research In Motion (RIM)'s data centre in Slough recently affected tens and millions of BlackBerry users, since the server systems of the data centre handle Blackberry services across the EMEA region, comprising Europe, Middle East, and Africa.

Research In Motion (RIM)’s BlackBerry Bold 9900 – which is the new BlackBerry OS 7 touting handset that was officially unveiled last week - will likely be released in the UK on August 16; with Vodafone UK having now made the handset available for pre-order.

With several reports claiming that BlackBerry Messenger played a key role in helping to organise the London riots, the BlackBerry-maker, Research In Motion (RIM), said in a Monday statement that it would extend all possible cooperation to the Scotland Yard in the inquiry.