RIM has been making headlines this past week, but not always for the right reasons.��At a press conference today, co-chief executive Jim Balsillie confirmed that the company will be introducing HSDPA high-speed BlackBerry models, and while more tentative suggested that a touchscreen version of the traditionally keyboard-centric device could be developed if consumer interest was strong enough.�

“Certainly going to HSDPA is something that’s very important to us in the near term” Jim Balsillie, co-chief executive, RIM

The news comes shortly after the BlackBerry network in the US suffered a major outage on Monday, with around 8m users experiencing patchy or a complete loss of email service for over three hours.

RIM are blaming an untested storage feature for the outage, which began at around 8.30pm GMT and ended just before midnight GMT.� It’s the second time in ten months that the BlackBerry system has failed, and while analysts generally don’t believe that the two incidents will be enough to cause a mass migration from RIM, there are concerns that a perceived unreliability could cause IT managers to consider alternative provision.

Despite strong performance in 2007, RIM shares have fallen by 18-percent so far in 2008; following the outage they dropped $1.17 to $93.30 on the Nasdaq.