The objective of the Canadian TSB is to analyze the evidence and come up with findings. They are well known and well respected within the accident investigation community and there is frequently significant cooperation between the NTSB and the Canadian TSB.

Any time a Canadian registered, designed or manufactured aircraft goes down in the USA it will be the Canadian TSB involved in the investigation. The converse is also true within Canada. I think if you look up annex 13 you'll find a complete section of the Chicago Convention that deals with this.

There really are no Canadian law implications with this investigation as it is a technical investigation done by engineers, not lawyers.

Reading posts you can generally tell what product each poster owns. Point for point the Blackberries match up with the requirements. Despite personal biases they have the goods and plenty of market experience doing so.

Put another way you're asking for a bread slicer. Instead of buying the industry standard machine that slices bread you have all sorts of proposals for trying to make ninja swords do the job instead. Hey, the sword will be a lot more flashy. At the end of the day security and business focus the only real bread slicer available is the blackberry. This has been their focus from day one. Not entertainment, not the latest greatest games, plain simple secure business apps. Ask the majority of law firms, accounting firms, security firms, police forces, military and government users. Alas, they are not using android or i-ninja-swords to slice the bread. Plain simple non-nonsense BES and Blackberries.

There is also no reason why the Android couldn't do the same. Lawyers don't care about whether it would have been possible for some company to modify their product to meet the requirements of a contract - they care what was done.

RIM designed their infrastructure and device from the ground up to be secure and there is a reason why nearly all the law firms, government contractors and big business uses their devices. Apple designed their iPhone around the best user experience - 2 different objectives and this explains why they've had great success with the home type users.

The problem with this is that it's media-driven. You can't compare reliability on a vehicle until you've had 1,000,000 on the road for 5 years. You are correct that Ford has done some catchup over the last 10 years but talk to anyone in the industry and they will tell you that the money is all made repairing domestics. Their engineering strategy of cheaper cheaper cheaper means a constant supply of work for us mechanics. I love domestics because I can make a lot of $$$ off them.

Walk into your local police station, law firm, government office you don't see the business people carrying around iPhone or Android. For security sensitive applications they are almost exclusively blackberries. This comes at a cost, sluggish phones and more potential for outages as they all rely on the encrypted infrastructure. It says something when middle eastern countries want to ban the phones because their intel communities can't get into them.

So while the common user may try to measure the success or failure of RIM in the home market they are still quite strong in the business world.