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- Let Tango Know You Want Video Chat on the BlackBerry PlayBook!
- RIM Shows Up on Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) Website
- BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0 Will Be a Global Launch
- PlayBook OS 2.0 Advertised in Best Buy Canada Flyer
- SRG Says PlayBook Now Has 15% of Canadian Tablet Market Share
- BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0 Walkthrough With RIM’s Jeff Gadway
- ShoutEm Creates a Timeline Infographic of All Five Mobile App Stores
- WordPress for BlackBerry Gets 1,000+ Downloads Per Day!
- WordPress for BlackBerry v1.6 Features Announced with WordPress.com Reader
| Let Tango Know You Want Video Chat on the BlackBerry PlayBook! Posted: 16 Feb 2012 02:09 AM PST Kemj let us know in the forums that there is a grassroots effort to convince Tango to bring their cross platform video calling app to the BlackBerry PlayBook. Ipsan Gonzalez started a thread on their forums and a Twitition (Twitter petition) awhile ago to show Tango that potential users want their solution on the PlayBook. If you have not heard of it before then check it out at www.tango.me. You can comment on Tango's forums here or simply sign the Twitition If you liked this article, you might find these interesting:
Posted by the BerryReview Team for ©BerryReview, February 16, 2012, 5:09 am. | Let Tango Know You Want Video Chat on the BlackBerry PlayBook! | Leave a comment |
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| RIM Shows Up on Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) Website Posted: 15 Feb 2012 01:49 PM PST Back in April of 2011 Mike Lazaridis let me know himself that DLNA was coming to the BlackBerry PlayBook. When he said soon I guess he had a different definition than me. Superfly_FR over @CBForums (via CB) has been religiously checking to see when RIM would appear on the www.dlna.org website and he finally spotted an update. Research in Motion is now a listed Manufacturer on the DLNA website here though they don't have any certified products yet. This means that RIM has finally joined the DLNA and is working on certifying devices. Who knows we may be seeing this sooner rather than later! If you liked this article, you might find these interesting:
Posted by the BerryReview Team for ©BerryReview, February 15, 2012, 4:49 pm. | RIM Shows Up on Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) Website | 2 comments |
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| BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0 Will Be a Global Launch Posted: 15 Feb 2012 12:54 PM PST Now that we have a basic idea of when PlayBook OS 2.0 is coming (current internal target is February 21st) many of you are wondering how to prepare. As we mentioned in our interview with Jeff Gadway this update will range from 400MB to 500MB so be sure to do it over a high speed connection. Gadway also let us know that the launch of PlayBook OS 2.0 will be a global launch and RIM is planning for the crazy load that will hit their update servers all at once from everywhere in the world. If you are updating from a device running the latest OS 1.0 you will have about a 400MB update and if you are just turning on a new PlayBook you are looking at about 500MB. This is because OS 2.0 is a drastic change of the kernel and not an incremental update. While we are on the topic of international rollouts I asked Gadway if PlayBook OS 2.0 will come with more language support including RTL languages like Arabic and Hebrew and I am waiting to hear back. Hopefully that will be included in this release though he didn't know off hand. Let us know if there are any other questions you had about the rollout that we can try to get answered! If you liked this article, you might find these interesting:
Posted by Ronen Halevy for ©BerryReview, February 15, 2012, 3:54 pm. | BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0 Will Be a Global Launch | 19 comments |
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| PlayBook OS 2.0 Advertised in Best Buy Canada Flyer Posted: 15 Feb 2012 12:53 PM PST If you need any more proof that we are just days away from BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0 launching you now have Best Buy Canada joining the fray. MobileSyrup scored their latest flyer which advertises the BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0 and extols its virtues. They also have a link for more details on the Best Buy website at www.bestbuy.ca/PlayBookOS2 which is not live yet. The pricing has it at $299 for a 16GB and $399 for the 32GB models which is higher than what we have seen recently… If you liked this article, you might find these interesting:
Posted by the BerryReview Team for ©BerryReview, February 15, 2012, 3:53 pm. | PlayBook OS 2.0 Advertised in Best Buy Canada Flyer | Leave a comment |
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| SRG Says PlayBook Now Has 15% of Canadian Tablet Market Share Posted: 15 Feb 2012 11:26 AM PST
Solutions Research Group out of Toronto performed a survey of 1,000 Canadians and found that market share for RIM's BlackBerry PlayBook has tripled since the fall. They found that it went up from 5% in the fall of last year to 15% now. This jump is most definitely caused by RIM's drastic price cuts to the PlayBook prices along with anticipation building for OS 2.0 this month. In other words it seems like RIM is making the most of the $485 million charge that they took on their earnings from PlayBook inventory and building market share with it. Now they just need to keep on plowing forward with some serious follow through. via Globe and Mail via CrackBerry If you liked this article, you might find these interesting:
Posted by Ronen Halevy for ©BerryReview, February 15, 2012, 2:26 pm. | SRG Says PlayBook Now Has 15% of Canadian Tablet Market Share | 2 comments |
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| BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0 Walkthrough With RIM’s Jeff Gadway Posted: 15 Feb 2012 11:08 AM PST
I had a chance to sit down with Jeff Gadway, Senior Brand & Marketing Communications Manager @ RIM, this week to demo what is coming in PlayBook OS 2.0. Now that the launch is right around the corner it is nice to see where the software stands and how it works. You will all have this new OS update in your hands very soon (RIM cannot confirm a date) and try it for yourself but until then I will try to focus on what I saw in the latest build. First things first PlayBook OS 2.0 will be a ~400-500MB update based on if you are upgrading from the latest v1.0 or just turning on a new PlayBook you just purchased.
Gadway let us know that there are three main focus points of PlayBook OS 2.0. They are Communications, Productivity, and Connections. One of the main things added in PlayBook OS 2.0 is the communications portion but it ties in well with the rest of the OS bundling in functionality from many of RIM's acquisitions including Gist and Tungle. The three main new apps in PlayBook OS 2.0 are the Unified Mailbox, Calendar, and Contacts application that are all native. It allows you to connect one of each of your Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn accounts and multiple email and exchange accounts. The most beautiful part is how RIM pulls it all together into one seemless mailbox. It allows you to both read your Facebook and Twitter messages and compose them from one place. You can multi-task by having multiple emails in your compose screen that you can flip between.
What I really was impressed with is that RIM seems to be focusing back on the basics that made BlackBerry great. I am talking about productivity. Gadway called it the BlackBerry Flow where RIM makes everything simpler. I simply compared BlackBerry Flow to the intuitiveness of how when you open an email on a BlackBerry smartphone the first option in the menu is reply. Once you click on that on the next screen the main option is send. In the PlayBook unified mailbox and the other applications this was clearly visible in how all the action buttons are on the right and left borders of the screen which is naturally where your hands sit. They also added quite a bit of HTML editing for email so you can bold, change fonts, colors, and other things when composing an email. Even cooler is the ability to edit email threads inline so you can respond inline! RIM also created nice connectivity between the apps which truly makes it feel like the PlayBook is getting the BlackBerry trademark productivity.
When it comes to the calendar app I was really impressed with what RIM did together with TAT and Tungle. The calendaring experience is very close to what you see in Outlook but with way more visual flair. For example, on the main month view screen you can see the days you are busier because the date gets bigger the more appointments you have. Also they have a little bar by each day that shows what time of day your appointments are based on a 24 hour bar. The day view lets you easily hold down an item and move it around along with inviting people to meetings and coordinating. It also has a cool view showing you who you are meeting with today. The most impressive view for me was the week view which showed you the whole week on one screen and then let you expand each day separately. The visual elements here are beautiful! Also worth noting is that if you pull down the menu bar it will show you your multiple calendars like Facebook, Gmail, Exchange, and even a local calendar and you can toggle on and off which ones you want to see.
Now this all ties back to the contacts app that is built dynamically for you from the accounts you registered to your PlayBook. It will pull in data for all your contacts and even reach out online to find more information. You will see which contacts are work contacts and then you can drill down even further with information it gets from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, articles about their company, their location, their latest updates… This is also integrated with the updated Video Chat app which gives you a presence identifier and automatically checks if a user has a PlayBook and tells you by showing a green icon by their name if they are online. You can click on any little detail in the contact and it will launch the respective app like a twitter account will launch Twitter (not an app) and a video chat ID will launch video chat. This all becomes even more useful when you are using the Video Chat app since it integrates your contact list directly into the app and automatically recognizes users. The interface also got a nice overhaul in 2.0.
Another huge update RIM has added in OS 2.0 is a new predictive keyboard. We have seen videos of this before hand but it really does simply predict what you are going to type next. You can write whole conversations just by typing the word "I" and then it will predict what you want to write next. This is impressive because it learns from your use so if you usually type I am coming home it will learn to predict that instead of the defaults. This is also an interesting new place for bridge to come in for users who like physical keyboards on their BlackBerry. You can now use your BlackBerry as both a physical keyboard and mouse for your PlayBook. That means you can use the touchscreen to move around the PlayBook screen and the keyboard on your smartphone to type on your PlayBook.
The Bridge feature in general got a bunch of new features. RIM showed off some of them like the new Open on PlayBook option by showing a picture you have on your phone on the PlayBook but this goes way further. Say for example you have an open email on your BlackBerry smartphone you can Open on to your PlayBook and it will open it up through the bridge. The same goes for things like PowerPoint attachments and Excel files. Pretty cool right? The one thing I was sort of hoping RIM had solved would be the potential for disconnect between your Smartphone and PlayBook. For example, if you read an email or change a calendar entry on your BlackBerry Smartphone it will not be able to reconcile that over the Bridge but would rely on Gmail or exchange to propagate that between the two devices.
Also worth noting are updated Documents to Go app along with other additions like a video store. App World has also been updated with a new look but it did not get the "Update All" button that I was hoping for. RIM has also updated the PlayBook OS with a Demo mode that cycles videos and tutorials so that when they are displayed at stores they will put their best foot forward. Any user can access this new mode. They are also putting out a new Discover Now 2.0 app that will help new PlayBook users discover OS 2.0 and its new features.
All in all I cannot wait to get PlayBook OS 2.0 on my device. This just gives us a taste of what RIM has in store for BlackBerry 10 and the phones running QNX. These apps also make the swipe left and right between apps gesture way more useful to switch between an email you are composing and your calendar. At launch there will not be a notes and tasks app but it looks like they are coming. RIM is also scheduled to release the PlayBook administration piece of BES/Fusion this quarter so hopefully that will add even more goodies.
I also asked Gadway if RIM is going to keep up on their promise for incremental updates instead of waiting for big splashes like they did with PlayBook OS 2.0. He explained that RIM did it this time since the different native apps needed to be interconnected first and could not be released separately. In the future RIM plans on being somewhere between the Apple approach of OS updates once a year and others that are fragmented with OS releases constantly. I can't wait to get to play with this for a few days on the final build once it is officially released! If you liked this article, you might find these interesting:
Posted by Ronen Halevy for ©BerryReview, February 15, 2012, 2:08 pm. | BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0 Walkthrough With RIM’s Jeff Gadway | 25 comments |
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| ShoutEm Creates a Timeline Infographic of All Five Mobile App Stores Posted: 15 Feb 2012 08:55 AM PST
Marija from ShoutEm let us know that they created a very cool "History of Mobile App Stores" infographic this month that documents the rise of the five main mobile app stores. It covers BlackBerry App World along with the Apple App Store, Android Market, Ovi Store, and Windows Phone Marketplace. Its interesting to see the progression for RIM laid down against their competition. Check it out by clicking the image below!
If you liked this article, you might find these interesting:
Posted by the BerryReview Team for ©BerryReview, February 15, 2012, 11:55 am. | ShoutEm Creates a Timeline Infographic of All Five Mobile App Stores | One comment |
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| WordPress for BlackBerry Gets 1,000+ Downloads Per Day! Posted: 15 Feb 2012 08:01 AM PST
I totally missed this in Danilo's @Automattic's announcement of upcoming WordPress for BlackBerry v1.6. He shared the impressive stats of WordPress for BlackBerry. According to him WordPress for BlackBerry was downloaded by 60,000 unique users in the past 2 months which is crazy. That is even more impressive whe you consider the fact that you can also download the app directly from the WordPress for BlackBerry website which is not included in that count. They are getting an average of 1,000 downloads per day and he even shared the breakdown of OS versions of users:
Those are some pretty impressive numbers which I hope will lead Automattic to consider releasing a WordPress app for the BlackBerry PlayBook! If you liked this article, you might find these interesting:
Posted by Ronen Halevy for ©BerryReview, February 15, 2012, 11:01 am. | WordPress for BlackBerry Gets 1,000+ Downloads Per Day! | 2 comments |
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| WordPress for BlackBerry v1.6 Features Announced with WordPress.com Reader Posted: 15 Feb 2012 06:58 AM PST
The team behind the very useful WordPress app have announced that the improvements coming in WordPress for BlackBerry v1.6 shortly. They mainly plan on doing this as a "Refresh" release to improve the experience on OS 6 & 7 BlackBerrys. They are also throwing in some fun perks like infinite scrolling and integration with their WordPress.com Reader feature. Also important is adding the ability to make a post sticky… Here are the current planned improvements:
If you are a WordPress for BlackBerry user I highly recommend heading over to their announcement post and putting in your two cents on what you want to see in version 1.6! If you liked this article, you might find these interesting:
Posted by Ronen Halevy for ©BerryReview, February 15, 2012, 9:58 am. | WordPress for BlackBerry v1.6 Features Announced with WordPress.com Reader | 4 comments |
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