You might have thought that BlackBerrys went out of style with the advent of the touch screen, but the company is making a bold move to put their devices back in the limelight. Well, in hospitals at least—BlackBerry announced that it might be in the market to make antimicrobial cell phones for health care workers, Bloomberg reports.

My first smartphone was a BlackBerry Curve. I have nothing but fond memories of it - the speed and ease of typing on that keyboard, the battery that lasted for days and days, the indestructibility of the thing. I think a lot of people feel that way about BlackBerry. Which makes it all the harder, because if BlackBerry had released the brand-new Z10 even just two or three years ago, it might've had a fighting chance. I like the way it thinks about some things - the gestures are cool, the homescreen's great - and the hardware is excellent.

There's a big BlackBerry event going on this morning - maybe the biggest BlackBerry event ever - and it's the company's last-ditch effort to keep from being plowed over in the smartphone game by Apple, Google, and Microsoft. Here's what you need to know.

BlackBerry has been having a rough go of it lately, slowly sliding into irrelevance as Android and iPhone corner the market. Now add one more nail to that coffin: a study says that people are allergic to BlackBerry phones. As in, an actual itch-inducing allergy. As in, to a phone.

Most cell phones are pretty good at auto-correcting the errant spelling and punctuation that can ensue when you're typing while furious, or sad, or gleeful. But what if the messages you're sending could also convey those emotions embedded in your words? RIM filed a patent for just such a messaging system, which can determine the emotional context of a text in a way that goes beyond the little :-) we all know.