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.
Monthly Archive for May, 2008Page 2 of 22
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.
ITTOMP, the lovingly-anacronymed picture-sharing service, announced an update at WES, including geotagging support. Although not new, it was news to me that the service supports video sharing too, which is pretty awesome considering how impressed with Qik I was. Geotagging is getting increasingly popular, with whole apps like GPSed revolving around it, and even becoming integrated into the BlackBerry 9000. You can nab the latest version of iTookThisOnMyPhone for free right over here.
This one nearly slipped under the WES radar, but not quite. SteelCloud, the BES-in-a-box that boasts a half-hour setup time, has announced that they’re preloading SteelWorks Mobile with Conceivium BES monitoring via MobileMonitor and Analyzer. The majority of BES admins I talked to at WES didn’t have a monitoring solution in place, so this is a pretty sweet deal to have it all bundled together with the initial set-up. There is talk that RIM will be including monitoring software with the next version (5.0) of the BlackBerry Enterprise Server, however… I wonder how much of a bite that will take out of potential BES monitoring customers…
