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BBCool hits the big three-oh, interviewing Best of WES Awards winners Bayalink and Neverfail, along with the week’s news, including the latest on the BlackBerry Kickstart, more disputes over the BlackBerry rollout in India, and a couple of international releases. Get your MP3 on, your iTunes on or your RSS feed on.
Monthly Archive for May, 2008
BlackBerry Cool Podcast: Episode 30
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JiveTalk currently rocks the multi-platform instant messaging on BlackBerry these days, but I just got wind of Palringo, which not only covers ICQ, AIM, Live Messenger, GTalk, Yahoo!, and a bunch of other popular IM services, but also lets you share voice notes and pictures easily. There’s also a community element to it, where you can join chat groups for mass communication. It’s a free OTA download, though still in beta, and there’s enterprise rollouts available if you’re in the market. Give it a shot, and let us know how it stacks up against your other mobile IM experiences.
The shots of 4.5’s BlackBerry Desktop Manager have already been sighted, but 4.6 due to launch with the BlackBerry Bold hasn’t been seen until now. The big feature is the iTunes media syncing promised to come with the BlackBerry 9000, but aside from that, everything looks more or less like the unreleased 4.5 DM.
Outalot just launched recently for New York and San Francisco residents, offering a very clean mobile website to find nearby restaurants, movies, bars and shops, an even lets you save particular locations for future reference. Entries include directions, maps, phone numbers, and even a rating system so others you know which ones are worth going to. Although things are just getting started with the site, you can suggest a city for Outalot to cover in the future. It’s really handy having a good collection of mobile sites on your BlackBerry browser, and as soon as Outalot hits Ottawa, you can bet it’ll be in my favourites.
There’s been significant beating around the bush and looking for alternative solutions, but after talks this week, the Indian Department of Telecom has flat-out demanded RIM provide full encryption codes to BlackBerry transmissions, or they’ll pull the devices from the country. Pretty harsh, but this whole thing has been going on for awhile now, and I could see why the government wants an immediate solution so it doesn’t drag on any longer. RIM cemented their opposition earlier this week, so things are looking pretty grim yet again.
Using an on-device app, MO-Call is offering cheap voice calling worldwide. Now available on a bevvy of BlackBerry devices, this sounds like a much smoother approach than dialling through a lengthy calling card processes, and who doesn’t want to save some coin on international calls? Cheers Hayden!
Some more information on the unreleased flip BlackBerry codenamed Kickstart has surfaced… The leaked slides seem to be an attempt to soothe the worries of diehard BlackBerry fans who are used to holstering their devices and checking them in a very specific way. The external LCD screen will prove to be a useful feature, showing off the first few lines of a message, the face of callers, scrolling through alerts easily with the side volume keys, and opening those alerts just by flipping the BlackBerry open. Outside of the business utilities, the outer screen will also show album art of music playing, which can be readily controlled by the volume and muting keys. Pretty standard stuff for existing flips, but definitely gives reasons for sticklers to switch their form factor.
XM Radio just let us know that they’re looking to test out their music service on the Suncom network for one week, and as a thanks for your feedback, they’re willing to toss a month of free service your way. There was plenty of negative feedback to the initial launch, so maybe some QA could help improve things. Shoot a line to xm-feedback@quickplay.com if you’re packing a GSM Pearl, Curve or 8800.
Vodafone has busted out the GPS-enabled Pearl in New Zealand for $899, alongside a new navigation service dubbed Compass which will be free until the end of October if you sign up before the end of July. After that, Kiwis will be looking at $2.50 or $10 per month. Outside of GPS, the BlackBerry 8110 touts all the usual features, like a 3.5mm headphone jack so your standard headphones can fit in there no problem, externally-accessible microSD slot for easy memory card swapping and a 2 megapixel camera with video recording. Of course, there’s always the 8310 available if you’re digging the full keyboard. More details on New Zealand’s 8110 here.
Hey, speaking of New Zealand, have you guys heard of Flight of the Conchords? Of course you have, my bad.
You already heard what the people have chosen, and now to announce what the supposed experts have to say. Like we mentioned in last week’s podcast, it’s a tough call to make with such a wide range of products being shown off at WES. The judges for each category had their own set of standards (as you can see), so the results are bound to be highly subjective. The fact of the matter is every exhibitor at WES had something worth showing off, and these were just some of the few that stuck out in our judge’s minds.
