A White House video notes President Obama's restriction on using a Blackberry during meetings with the president. Instead, they must be left in a basket by the door.
Interesting to note: A CNN frame capture from the video shows that U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice carries three of them.
Ben Smith: "It's probably good for their personal politics not to be checking email
while the president talks, but the technological features of the White
House bubble are real and imposing. The absence of Obama's tech-savvy
press aides from Twitter, for instance, have left the White House
silent in one of each day's important streams of political
conversation; staff is restricted to lurking. Instant messaging has
gone from the place where (for reporters) campaigns dueled on a
minute-to-minute basis to a form where the White House is, for fear of
creating embarrassing records, silent."