The voice of the BlackBerry community.
BlackBerry Messenger has been down for some time now. Apparently there are outages across North American carriers that affect BBM, Internet browsing and apps that use data. There have been several outages in recent months and this one is particularly bad. These outages don’t normally last long so it will surely be fixed by Christmas when many will unbox their new BlackBerry.
Let us know what you’re experiencing!
BBM has been updated to version 5.0.0.57. There have been problems reported with BBM today so it may affect the download.
After having heard the RIM Q3 Fiscal 2010 Conference Call, I thought I would post a summary of the quarter in case you missed the call or you want a brief synopsis.
This was an excellent quarter for RIM. They shipped a record number of devices and exceeded the previous quarter’s projections. Over 10 million BlackBerrys were shipped, bringing the total to over 75 million BlackBerrys sold around the world. The BIS subscriber base is growing steadily, and once again, non-enterprise users comprised over 80% of net new subscribers.
Click through to continue reading a summary of Q3 for the fiscal year ending 2010
Inside BlackBerry have updated their site with a new look as well as more community features. The new layout features:
The update looks decent and it makes reading the site a little easier. Overall, I think this is a positive improvement, but I the real value from Inside BlackBerry is going to be from the content. I really liked the most recent article about the trackpad, and I think RIM should put out more of these. At least a feature per day would be ideal.
[Hat tip @caspan]
Verizon is now pushing BlackBerry users to use Bing as the search engine of choice for their smartphone. To do this, Verizon have removed Wikipedia and Google from the BlackBerry browser search bar. While users can still find ways around this, such as downloading the Bing app or bookmarking the search page, it’s still a pain and hurts the end user experience.
In the end, Verizon needs to be giving users options. I often find that Bing doesn’t return the search answers I’m looking for, while Google is almost 100% reliable. Also, considering Verizon is such a large buyer of BlackBerry smartphones, I don’t think this is good for the brand.
Elite Systems have released Paperboy, the classic 80′s arcade game, for BlackBerry. The app supports 5 languages and is available for most non-touchscreen devices.
One of the big challenges for this game is going to be nailing the controls. I’ve played a lot of retro arcade games on BlackBerry and many of them fail in their attempt to make the game controls as easy as they were on the arcade platform. It’s also going to be interesting to see how the trackpad affects gaming on BlackBerry as well. Personally, I have only played a few games on the 9700, and I have to say, you don’t get as much control as with the trackball.
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