The entire bezel is touch sensitive and can be used to swipe between apps and bring up menus.
The virtual keyboard and screen are multitouch. You can also get the keyboard in both landscape and portrait.
There are swipe gestures galore.
While the event is an Adobe event meant for developers, a lot of media have been showing up to take a look at the device. Even though they’ll tell you they got a “hands-on”, it looks like RIM isn’t letting anyone play around with it too much as the device isn’t ready for consumption. It would be cool to hear more about the APIs and features that will be available to developers. We’ll try and get you those details soon.
The AIR MILES Reward Program app is available to Canadians via App World and it has some decent features built around a nice user interface (looks a lot like Foursquare). The AIR MILES app uses your location to find Sponsors in your area as well as gets you the latest news on AIR MILES bonus offers. Continue reading ‘AIR MILES Reward Program App Now Available for Canadians’
Aion has updated their aiSPot GPS Toolset app with improved maps view, better integration with BlackBerry Maps, as well as Italian and Russian language support.
A 2010 BlackBerry Super Apps Challenge, Regional Selection, aiSPot GPS Toolset has a long feature set that makes it a powerful app for anyone in need of a good mapping app. One particularly cool feature of aiSpot is the map view which constantly aligns according to your movement. Overlayed on the map is a compass with bearing (azimuth to the destination point), and trip parameters like the course angle, distance covered, and more.
The above video shows you some interesting highlights from Mike Lazaridis at the Dive Into Mobile conference. Generally, the interview was pretty tough as Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher inundated Lazaridis with questions about where the platform is going and how RIM is going to keep up with the competition. Mike L didn’t do the best job of answering their questions, but it must be hard when every question starts with “so, your brand and phone is terrible…”.
While Mike L wanted to focus on the PlayBook and discuss how powerful it is, Walt, Kara and the audience, wanted to know about the smartphone. Sure, the PlayBook is cool, but what about the actual smartphone? The answer seems to be that RIM is moving in the direction of multicore, QNX OS smartphones, but it won’t be overnight. RIM is definitely working on multicore products, but consider this: the average BlackBerry has a 2 year development cycle, and RIM only acquired QNX this year. It could be that we won’t see a QNX multicore device until be 2013. Continue reading ‘Highlights from Mike Lazaridis at the Dive Into Mobile Conference’
The latest hands-on video of the BlackBerry PlayBook comes courtesy of the Meet the BlackBerry PlayBook developer sessions in New York City. We’re pretty sure the video is taken by Rob Kao of SmrtGuard, but the actual PlayBook handling is done by a RIM employee. The PlayBook software is definitely still a work in progress and it seems that RIM employees are pretty careful about how they demo the device. In this video, we get to see the camera booted up with both the front and back being used. Cool stuff!
