Only a country as great as Belgium could handle the sheer awesomeness of not only chocolate and waffles, but also the GPS-enabled BlackBerry 8310, with a side-order of BlackBerry 8100. GSM carrier Proximus will be sporting the AZERTY-keypad-clad devices, with the Pearl running € 299, and the new Curve going for € 449. Proximus is also packing the BlackBerry 8820 for any Belgians looking to get some Wi-Fi action. We love hearing about BlackBerry news from around the globe, so if something is going on in your corner of the planet, feel free to drop us a line at info at blackberry cool dot com.
Monthly Archive for September, 2007Page 2 of 17
By popular demand, we’ve got round two of our interview with the preeminent tech blogger Boy Genius. BlackBerry Cool’s EIC Doug Soltys yaks it up with the Big BG about leaks, carriers, manufacturers, advertisers, MVNOs, and the iPhone. Without further ado, here‘s the podcast for your listening pleasure. (Also on iTunes, if that’s your bag.)
Today the RIMM stock peaked over the $100-mark, which would have been $300 pre-split (well beyond the previously forecasted $275). The target price is sitting at around $120 right now, which is within arm’s reach of the current $98.56. We might want to keep an eye out to see if analysts will bump it up yet again, but others, such as Bear Stearns, has dummed down RIMM’s rating to “Peer Perform”. There’s plenty of doubt on how long RIM can keep the momentum going, but I’m more inclined to hop on the train rather than hop off.
ABI Research just published a paper today that forecasts memory cards to have sold $7 billion this year, while headsets take second place in the mobile accessory market at $5 billion. The prime reason for this is that headsets are becoming more frequently bundled with devices, while memory cards still need to be bought separately. This shift isn’t a huge surprise, since mobile multimedia is gaining popularity and needs to address hardware bottlenecks. With high capacity SD cards becoming more widespread and the new UFS card gaining support, the memory market is looking pretty sweet.
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Broadcom will be showcasing a new chip at the Institute of Navigation conference in Ft. Worth, Texas today. The BCM4750 chip is aimed to have low power consumption and high sensitivity, as well as some new advancements which would allow for signals to reach indoors and into urban canyons. We often forget that Broadcom actually does some, y’know, engineering amidst all the litigation.
“The Broadcom BCM4750 is produced in a low cost 90 nanometer CMOS process and features superior receiver technology and tracking sensitivity. The receiver makes full use of the Global Locate architecture, and can measure the faintest GPS signals deep indoors and in “urban canyon” environments at signal levels as low as -162 dBm. It also consumes less than 15 mW while navigating with one second map updates, less than half the power of competitive solutions according to published datasheets.”
There were reports yesterday of yet another BlackBerry-wide outage, ranging from a 15 minute delay in message delivery to the better part of a day. BIS and most e-mail was affected, but .blackberry.net addresses were still running smoothly. At this point, folks are getting pretty frustrated with intermittent BlackBerry service, especially when companies depend on it to keep business moving. Unless RIM can get a handle on expanding to accommodate rising traffic, or properly testing their software updates before installing them, or whatever the problem is at their end, people will start switching devices. Is anyone still having problems?
