Consumers generally give a damn about one of those two things, and it's not the uptime. If anything, your comment is some excellent commentary on why RIM is failing.
I appreciate that uptime is important to you, but RIM will certainly fail if they are still targeting users with your requirements. It is the reason why you don't see a focus on uptime from other vendors; it is effectively meaningless in 2011.
I doubt anything that RIM can do will outweigh the painfully outdated licensing and proprietary server technology that is their platform. They had plenty of time to evolve, but they didn't. It's hard to imagine how they can catch up again now that most people would trade a good browser in their pocket for anything RIM has to offer instead.
The problem is that there are three types of people:
1.) They want the lowest common denominator in tech, the easiest and simplest option, the Nokia 3310.
2.) Features, features, features. This letter makes the point that no-one ever choses option A over option B because of an extra feature, and while there is some truth to that... that is with regard to iPad vs. PlayBook, or iPhone vs. Android. Anyone I've ever known chose an iPhone over a Blackberry has used reasons such as "better web browsing", "a music player that doesn't suck", "wider range of better apps" and so on. And those are hardly subjective, in my opinion anyway. Phonecalls, SMS, BBM, Email, you can't beat a blackberry, pretty much anything else you want to do, even simple things like watching a video or using as an MP3 player, it just sucks at. There are some blackberry apps that are great, for example (in my case) UberSocial for Twitter, and the MLB At Bat app, but those are few and far between.
3.) The third type of people are people like me who know exactly what we want, to the extent that we don't mind missing out on the features we could have with a different phone, but don't want simple either. We're pretty rare.
The problem is that the first type of person, the features of a blackberry are perfect for them, but using it? It confuses the hell out of my father, who took to an iPhone immediately (and found an Android phone just as easy). If you're not simpler and less confusing, or offering an even comparable range of features, and costing the same, then there's very few people who will chose you - at this point, sexiness of the product is hardly even relevant, that only comes into play if both products would fulfil roughly the same role.
1. Change some lines of codes
2. Deploy to device
3. Wait 5 min.
4. See if it worked
5. goto 1
My average uptime is about 2mins. doing that.
I ask because I occasionally had to reboot my original iPhone, and 3GS, but I simply haven't thought about rebooting my iPhone 4 running IOS4.
But yeah, I'm with you that I rarely think about rebooting my iPhone 4.
Disclaimer: I'm on the WebKit team at RIM.
Also lots of other quirkiness in the OS drove me batty.
BTW, the RIM webkit browser implementation is excellent, just the horsepower of the phone letting things down. And I miss the physical keyboard!
Maybe for some devices deployed in a corporate IT setting (where these changes aren't allowed at all without an admin) the devices are stable, but for a regular consumer user, I don't think they would see very high uptime. (I also agree that they would largely not care about high uptime, however being constantly asked to reboot the phone is annoying, ie I think users probably start caring about uptime only when it's LOW)