While U.S. demand for BlackBerry’s smart phones could be described as tepid at best, people in Indonesia were willing to riot over them. From TechCrunch:

A crowd of 3,000 people waited in line today in Jakarta, Indonesia for a new smartphone. In fact, the group got so out of control that riot police had to be brought in to calm the masses.

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RIM may have bitten off more than it could chew this morning promising a 50 percent discount on the handset for the first 1,000 buyers. Turns out, about 3,000 people wanted to be one of those lucky thousand, and when the announcement came that the phone had sold out… Well, things got ugly. According to the Press Association, the masses were “rattling the gates” and later “went crazy” after hearing they would not only miss out on the discount, but the phone entirely.

While it’s great to see strong demand for a BlackBerry device, it’s unfortunate that the main message to come out of this event was civil unrest and violence.