I had this experience before, either when the first time I bought blackberry 2 years ago. That time I bought 7290 at ITC Roxy Mas and unfortunately the blackberry that I bought was suspended, because the blackberry PIN still active on another service provider.
All blackberry devices has a pin as an identifier of uniqueness of the handset for the blackberry services. It's designed by the blackberry system from RIM that PIN will be unique on each handset and it will registered to the blackberry server to serve the customer such as forwarding email that we subscribe to the right handset. Blackberry handheld is re-present the client that will receive forwarding or any email or message that we registered to blackberry service system to provide us realtime email. And the blackberry server will automatically get and forward the email that arrive to our mailbox to the blackberry handheld device. That's why the blackberry PIN should be unique.
Last two week our government (Indonesia government) had a meeting with RIM and ask them to open the suspended PIN of blackberry so the customer is not got this suspended issue. But I don't know whether are they really understand what's make PIN is so important for RIM, and why they need to keep the PIN unique. In Indonesia there's now a heaven of blackberry seller, any blackberry handheld will be sold fast with better profit, but they event don't understand how this stuff works. (I mean most of them, not all). I just wonder how about if this thing happens, or one of the government guy had a PIN that duplicate by someone that not legally do it, and the effect some of the classified email or message send to wrong person, but that's the problem not because wrong destination address from the email or message, but because of the PIN duplicated, so the system don't know who's the owner.
I don't think RIM and all party want this thing happens, and for me, what RIM do to suspend the duplicate PIN was the right action if we consider the impact at the end.
From my point of view, if RIM just wanna make business they just allow all those handset active and don't care about duplication or in-secure system. But I really appreciate they still stand to maintain integrity and trust from their customers.
