The voice of the BlackBerry community.
Salomondrin does a great job of leaking videos of unreleased devices and his most recent is a comparison of the Bold 9700 and the Bold 9000. The BlackBerry Bold 9700 aka the Onyx, will have some decent specs with a 3.2MP camera, 256 MB of memory and a tighter form factor.
Because these videos are constantly being pulled, we’ve decided to bring it to you in picture form.
click through to see some notes and pictures from the Bold 9700 and 9000 comparison video
BlackBook for BlackBerry is a new app that acts just like a physical black book in that it’s a secret place to store contacts.
With BlackBook, you get a hidden contact list, that’s accessible only by entering a customizable key combination on your keypad. Everything is hidden within the BlackBook including sms,pin,email and phone.
This is important: because BlackBook is a hidden contact list, it does not have an icon. Instead, use a secret key-combination to get access.
Features of this software include:
NFL themes from Bplay are $1.00 off as of now and the sale runs until Sunday, September 13th at 11:59PM EDT. Find your favorite team and support them on your BlackBerry.
Purchasing a theme also guarantees your team will get a touchdown during their next game.*
Get your NFL theme for $4.99 (regularly $5.99).
*Guarantee void if your team is the Kansas City Chiefs.
The research behind iPhone and BlackBerry comparisons that is making its way into the mainstream media is almost always flawed. The media loves to talk about the prolific nature of the iPhone and how technologically advanced its users are, while almost implicitly ragging on BlackBerry.
The study shows that about 72% of iPhone users are likely to have downloaded at least 10 third-party apps, but 73% of BlackBerry users have picked up five apps or less. The researchers add that iPhone owners are more willing to buy their apps than BlackBerry owners.
When it comes to downloading third party apps, this study failed to recognize that bulk apps, shouldn’t be recognized as multiple applications. They are essentially the same app, templated and replicated by changing a few small pieces of data. This is where RIM shines in that App World isn’t filled with the same amount of useless garbage.
With regards to social networking, the researchers found that roughly 71% of Apple users have a Facebook account versus 44% of BlackBerry users. Twitter follows a similar trend with 26% for iPhone versus 15% for BlackBerry.
Social networking discrepancies is a demographics issue, not a device issue as the research implies. While BlackBerry is moving its focus to the consumer market, it still has years of enterprise users behind it and this could be skewing the numbers. In the end, we all know that the BlackBerry is an incredibly powerful social networking tool. Whether or not the older BlackBerry demographic is using these services is another matter.
One element of the research that I find particularly flawed, is the research that says 83 percent of users prefer apps that cost below $5. This is a consistent mistake that researchers make. They think that just because you have asked someone what they want to pay for something, that that information is somehow valuable. The truth is that everyone wants to pay the minimum, and if possible, get it for free. The reality of the situation is that if your app is well designed and provides a tangible benefit to the user, the $5 benchmark is meaningless. Just look at TetherBerry, it’s a $50 application that is one of Mobihand’s best sellers.
Skype needs to get its public relations team aligned with their developers because there are some serious inconsistencies in what the we’re hearing from mainstream media and what is actually being delivered.
For example, on March 20th, 2009, The New York Times reported that Skype “will make its free software available immediately for Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch and, beginning in May, for various BlackBerry phones, made by Research in Motion.”
Yesterday, the Financial Post reported that Skype “is reportedly developing an app for the BlackBerry.”
If one had to guess, the delays are likely caused by changes in ownership at Skype. When these organizational changes happen, projects are sometimes put on hold and reevaluated. As you may remember, Skype was bought by a group of investors including the Canadian Pension Plan’s investing wing for almost $2 billion USD.
Skype, where is the BlackBerry app?
Yesterday, customers all over North America were experiencing problems getting BIS email.
There are a number of reasons why your BlackBerry BIS email me not be working. For example, it’s possible that the NOC has gone down. The NOC is the Network Operations Center, and it is where messages go when they leave your device before being passed to the carrier. If the NOC goes down, your email will stop sending and you have to wait for RIM to fix the issue.
You may also stop receiving email if the carrier’s BIS server farm is having issues. This could be for any number of reasons. Other reasons include server hardware failure at RIM’s end, or a software bug.
Due to the complex nature of the architecture it’s impossible to speculate without some kind of hint from RIM. Sites such as Dataoutages, are great for providing updates and they had the following on yesterday’s issue:
Reported by: Multiple sources across Canada and USA.
Trouble Ticket Number: TT000011677021
Severity: 2-Medium
Description of Issue: Degradation of RIM BlackBerry BIS service.
Location of Issue: All Regions ;All Markets and surrounding areas
Start Time: Sep 09 2009 12:06 PM PDT
Symptoms you MAY experience: RIM BlackBerry BIS customers may experience delays in sending/receiving email.
Estimated time of repair: Unknown
Technicians are working towards resolution as quickly as possible.
What’s going on RIM?
Bad Behavior has blocked 27949 access attempts in the last 7 days.