This morning, T-Mobile and RIM put official word to what BlackBerry Cool readers have known for awhile. The T-Mobile BlackBerry Curve 8900 will launch this February, at an undetermined date (although we have two goodideas for you). While there’s no word on pricing yet, we do know that T-Mobile is including a 256MB MicroSD card in the Curve 8900, which is so small as to be practically useless. You can find a link to the BlackBerry Curve 8900′s specs (PDF) and RIM’s Curve 8900 page below, as well as the full press release after the jump.
Bell has made two recent announcements which show that 2009 will be a big year for them in terms of multimedia content. Firstly, Bell announced yesterday that they have reached a deal with QuickPlay Media to power their live and on-demand services, including live TV and radio.
Wayne Purboo, president and CEO, QuickPlay Media said “QuickPlay is excited that Bell Mobility has chosen us to power its mobile TV services and to build on our long-standing relationship, which now enables Bell to provide subscribers with the option to watch both live and on-demand content on most video-enabled mobile devices. With our flexible mobile video solutions our customers are equipped to not only meet the demands of their customers today, but to accommodate changing mobile content demands and associated service requirements in the future.”
Bell’s first offering is an exciting one for Canadians: live NHL games on NHL Audio, in-game and post-game video highlights, live NHL games through NHL Centre Ice Mobile and real-time text message alerts. For $8/month, Bell subscribers get all this as well as NHL wallpapers, ringtones, Mobile Video Exclusives that has pictures from the past, Fantasy tips and Game of the Week insight.
If there is one thing that bothers me to no end about my BlackBerry Storm, it is the extreme difficulty in using it as a phone. It’s not because of call quality, which is great, or problems with dialing phone numbers via the SureTouch screen. It’s because the freaking screen doesn’t lock during a call, causing you to often accidentally hang up or mute your call. Extremely frustrating!
Thankfully, there is an application in beta right now that corrects RIM’s poor design choice. Called TalkLock, the application prevents users from accidentally pressing the screen and launching programs or functions while talking on the Storm. Disabling the lock and returning to normal phone behavior is done by swiping your finger across the screen from left to right at any time. Yes, it’s just that simple.
I feel bad for all those poor souls that have locked themselves into Sprint/Nextel for push-to-talk functionality, only to wait an average of three years for new iDEN BlackBerrys. HipVoice is a cross carrier push-to-talk service that will soon be launching for BlackBerry. As the video shows above, not only does it work irrespective of your BlackBerry or carrier, subscribers will also be able to communicate with WinMo and Symbian devices (iPhone coming soon). Here are the different ways HipVoice can be used.
UNICAST: Push-To-Talk one to one MULTICAST: Push-To-Talk one to many (Also to Walkie Talkies) CHANNEL: Push-To-Talk to anyone subscribed to the channel RICH MESSAGING: Text message users that are on or off-line
HipVoice is looking to charge $10/month for the service. Honestly, I’m not sure how they’re doing this, but sign me up. You can learn more about HipVoice at http://hipvoice.com.
Just before the New Year we had posted a screen capture showing a February 18th release date for the BlackBerry Curve 8900 on T-Mobile. Those fine gents at BerryReporter have published a new image showing a possible February 11th release date. Whether it comes just before Valentine’s Day or just after, I’m sure T-Mobile subscribers are itching to get their hands on the ‘BlackBerry Bold Lite’.
TechCrunch has posted an interesting (if cursory) investigation of the ways in which the Twitter community gets their Tweet on. Getting their metrics from Twitstat, TechCrunch shows that not only does popular BlackBerry Twitter client TwitterBerry crack the top ten, but TwitterBerry users are going Twitter crazy, with an average of 3.68 tweets per user. Currently, TwitterBerry is beating out desktop clients TweetDeck (a personal favorite) and FriendFeed.
While Twitstat’s metrics come from both a small and dedicated group of users, and thus don’t reflect the general Twitter population, it really doesn’t matter. BlackBerry users have always been considered ‘hardcore’ adopters, and it’s cool to know they’re using TwitterBerry to keep their Twitter feed well stocked. Are you on Twitter? If so, follow us:
If there is one thing that bothers me to no end about my BlackBerry Storm, it is the extreme difficulty in using it as a phone. It’s not because of call quality, which is great, or problems with dialing phone numbers via the SureTouch screen. It’s because the freaking screen doesn’t lock during a call, causing you to often accidentally hang up or mute your call. Extremely frustrating!
