Up and down week for BlackBerry

Is the reported demise of BlackBerries premature? Well, if nothing else, the long battle is... well, long.

Here is how SiliconValley.com's Good Morning Silicon Valley reports it:

This would have been a heck of a lot more helpful on Wednesday, you know:

Research in Motion finally got a break in its bitter patent dispute with NTP. On Thursday, the day after a U.S. district court judge turned down a request by RIM to enforce a preliminary $450 million settlement reached earlier this year with NTP, the United States Patent and Trademark Office rejected one of the five NTP patents at issue in the dispute. The action is not yet final, but is expected to be upheld in the future. Interestingly, the Telenor patent, which I mentioned here back in July seems to have played a role in the USPTO's action. That patent describes a wireless e-mail system that predates NTP's concept by many years. At the time it was discovered, American Technology Research analyst Rob Sanderson speculated that it could spell trouble for NTP. "On the surface, this seems like it could have terminal consequence for the validity of NTP's patents, which have already been rejected on first office action by the PTO," he told GMSV. Seems he was right.