While viruses on a portable device are certainly possible, given today's online environment and just what vulnerabilities are used to accomplish, it isn't really worth it to create viruses on portable devices.

Viruses today are often used to secretly take over computers (often referred to as turning them into zombie PCs) to be used later, either to send out tons of unsolicited e-mail (spam) or to be used in conjunction with many other zombie PCs to bring a site down with a distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack.

As it stands now, portable devices aren't powerful enough to effectively do things like this unnoticed. There will be a noticeable drag on resources and this is more likely to alert the user, something which isn't good for the person using the exploit as the hackee is likely to try to remove it. Of course, as portable devices become more powerful, this may change as said background exploits will take up a smaller percentage of the phone's resources.

Your Blackberry owner friend should take it to someone more knowledgeable than he so that he can check to see if his problem is a hardware problem or a software (and possibly virus) problem.
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