I noticed two interesting things yesterday during the outage:

1. The battery was drained faster than normal on my 9550. The same thing happened during the last outage so I wonder if this is "normal."

2. I was riding (not driving) around with the wife and family looking at Christmas lights and realized that we were a bit lost. I turned on BlackBerry Maps and got the gps going but no maps due to the outage. Not knowing this I shut down BlackBerry Maps and turned on Google Maps and got an error message that I needed to have data service and to contact my service provider. So at this point I realized that BIS was down. As a half hearted try I turned on Bing Maps and it worked. I got our location and monitored as we drove around for about 5 miles.

So the 29 cent question was why did the Bing Map function work with BIS down? Does Bing bypass some of the BIS system? Did I happen to turn on Bing Maps during a short period of time that BIS was working?

For the PMs I posted here as Bing has been pushed to the 9550s and I was wondering if anyone else noticed this bizzare situation yesterday.

1. likely, because its constantly searching for a data connection. just like when its searching for 3G, and not finding it.

I was able to regain services by battery pulls. Did about 3 of them throughout the day and was beginning to think it was my phone until I found out about the outage.

Yes you did what many did.

It worked, at least for a little while...