Mayor Martin O'Malley has an addiction: BlackBerries.
Not the fruity sort, the wireless kind. And he's gotten City Hall hooked.
The mayor and his wireless e-mail device are literally attached at the hip - he wears it on his belt. He takes it with him to bed and on vacation. In public he often can't stop himself from checking the handheld gadget or from thumb-typing missives to staff at all hours of the day, every day of the week.
Word of his habit has traveled throughout the state and beyond.
"The only time Mayor O'Malley is not on his BlackBerry is when he's sleeping," said David N. Cicilline, the mayor of Providence, R.I., who picked up his own BlackBerry habit after meeting O'Malley last year.
O'Malley concedes he is addicted.
"It would be difficult to function without it," he said.
It's easy to see why.
The BlackBerry (nicknamed by many as "CrackBerry" because of its addictive convenience) is a palm-size wireless computer that receives and sends e-mail, stores documents and serves as an address book and appointment calendar.
It resembles a pager but is fitted with a full keyboard for typing text messages and a narrow screen for receiving them. The latest models also double as cell phones.
The device, while small, has made a big impression at City Hall since O'Malley introduced it two years ago.
The Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks led O'Malley to purchase BlackBerries for his Cabinet members because the gadget was one of the few communication devices that worked in New York after the destruction of the World Trade Center.
O'Malley said he was unable to call or page anyone while driving back to Baltimore after the attacks diverted his trip to Manhattan that day.
"To be out of touch like that during an emergency was a very uncomfortable feeling," he said.
Popularity grows
O'Malley's choice of the BlackBerry has proven prescient considering its increasing use by federal government agencies since Research In Motion Limited, a Canadian firm, launched the product in January 1999.
The National Institutes of Health use the BlackBerry extensively, and the National Security Agency has approved of its security measures, clearing it for Department of Defense use. A report in The Hill, a weekly publication covering Congress, stated recently that "BlackBerries have come to rival even cell phones for ubiquity in the halls of Congress."
