If I were the US president, I wouldn't want my Blackberry [infosecuri...gazine.com] to be at the mercy of a South Korean corporation. It's risky enough for a Canadian corp to be running such a sensitive device, but if it's going to be foreign (and so not entirely subject to US laws, and obviously having a national interest that sometimes competes with America's), Canadian is about the least risky. Especially after decades of integration with sensitive US operations, including the space arm on the NASA shuttles. But South Korea is not nearly as reliable, given its understandably different national interests and lower integration with US law. Not to mention the higher stakes in S. Korea with its insane nuke-armed neighbor changing kings and looking for new terms in their permanent war backed by the US.

In any case President Me would rather have an Android phone, with an OS my spooks could inspect with a fine toothed comb, than a closed OS - whether foreign made or not. I wouldn't want Steve Jobs' ghost having secret access to my top-secret iPhone messages, especially when there are so many laws and lawsuits Apple could use my help "fixing". Even just tracking my location through a commercial datacenter seems a breach of national security.

The US has such a large military, and budget to match, that I'd expect the White House to come with our own government smartphones on a secure network. There's no reason my phone couldn't use a gateway device carried by my entourage that goes over a secure military satellite network, even if the gateway is too big for me to carry myself. I don't carry the nuke football, either. But I could carry a civilian smartphone, battery out, in case I was separated from my entourage and as a last resort had to make a call on a public network.

Also, I wholeheartedly believe it's the wrong aproach. The US really needs a legal overhaul - SOPA, PIPA and CIPA should be approved, put them through and let people live under this regime for 3-4 months, then people will start to notice how truly wrong the world has become.

A single day of black out will make people think "oh, but it's not my fight really". Make it stick, force people to jump through hoops to get their youtube and lolcat fix; then action will be taken and it will be swift.

They failed at: reliability, uptime and ease of use
Real life example:
- Today i just missed a rescheduled meeting because my BlackBerry failed to ring the alarm (usually happens after too many days with no reboot);
- Had about 4 half-day to full-day outages in the last month;
- BES server upgrade caused ~15% of the Blackberry users in my department to lose access for around 3 days and then they had to reformat their devices to be able to receive mail again.

They just don't know it yet. I have their latest and greatest 9860 (because I don't have a choice - thanks corporate idiots), and it is a complete and utter piece of shit. The first phone bricked itself within the first week, common problem with this model. The screen is plastic, and feels like it. The touchscreen is horribly inaccurate, making typing on it something dreadful and to be avoided. The on/off button is the entire top of the phone, so when you slip it in a pocket, it is very likely to turn the screen on. It is so under-powered, I'm constantly playing the guessing game of "did I tap the dialog box or not". The "app store" looks like the bargain bin at Blockbuster. Every time I pick this phone up it pisses me off.