Being distracted can be devastating.

As a one-shot deal; this frees RIM to go back to its business without any further complications.

You now have a very nice, seamless e-mail experience with BlackBerry. If you want to do just voice and e-mail, it's hard to beat a BlackBerry.

This is something Yahoo has been trying to do for a long time: broaden its online presence into the mobile tier.

Given their problem with the Palm OS and Access, they have to do something. It would be better if they could do something more quickly. But it's a win for Palm and for RIM.

The settlement is a win-win deal, though it is very painful for RIM, and it proves that our patent system is completely broken. NTP gets $612 million for coming up with a fairly obvious idea, patenting it and suing a company too arrogant to settle early on.

They're damned if they do launch a bunch of new phones, and they're damned if they don't.

Arguably there's no signal now. In my house it doesn't work. In my mom's house it doesn't work. In my in-laws house it doesn't work. So I don't think it's worth worrying about one way or the other.