Blackberry maker Research in Motion (RIM) used to rule the mobile roost essentially unchallenged. Until the iPhone was introduced and began eating up its market share. The recent release of the BlackBerry Torch was designed as a counterstrike (its slide out keyboard no doubt an enticement to keep current BB users). However, two international stories threaten to put a damper on the company's comeback.

Hot on the heels of RIM's roll-out of their new smartphone, Saudi Arabia is threatening to block Blackberry Messenger, email, and browsing services on Friday, according AppleInsider. The nation wants access to encrypted messages, much in the same way that India and Kuwait have also complained about not being able to monitor various Blackberry services. RIM was quick to reply to this in a statement, noting that Blackberry's enterprise security is symmetric "whereby the customer creates their own key and only the customer ever possesses a copy of their encryption key." According to RIM, they couldn't provide access if they wanted to.

While Saudi Arabia isn't a particularly huge market for smartphones comparatively (the shutdown will affect about 700,000 users), the country's objection comes at a bad time for RIM. The United Arab Emirates is also threatening to block access on October 11th on the same grounds just one year after allowing access to the iPhone, but more particularly worrisome has to be the news out of the European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union.

In a search for a new smartphone for 2,500 employees that began back in 2008, the EC began weighing various criteria for adoption, according to CNET. They looked at "security, financial impact, integration in the EC's IT infrastructure, resiliency, administrative overhead, and openness toward other applications and future technologies." RIM and their smartphone did not come out winners in this evaluation, the Commission instead opting iPhone's and HTC handsets. We can only hope the EC has chosen to overlook exploding handsets. It may only affect a small number of staff, but the spillover may have repercussions.

To be sure, in a smartphone world that has multiple millions of users, 2,500 here, 700,000 there, isn't the end of the world. However, as the iPhone begins moving into a dominant slot with the constellation of Android handsets coming up strong and fast, RIM needs not to be seen as struggling in the midst of launching a comeback. They no doubt remember, once upon a time, that Palm ruled the PDA world before being seen as stodgy and unable to compete -- and where are they now?