Posted on May 5, 2011, at 1:12 PM .
RIM has announced this year’s winners of the Wireless Achievement Awards. The awards cover several areas including attendee choice, innovation in the private sector, innovation in the public sector and business impact. The awards recognize companies that do business in new and innovative ways with a focus on increasing performance, simplicity of use and cost saving solutions.
Read more about the Wireless Achievement Award Recipients after the jump.
Continue reading ‘RIM Announces the Wireless Achievement Award Winners’
Posted on May 5, 2011, at 11:45 AM .
Hot on the heels of the BlackBerry 9900 series announcement, comes the Java SDK beta for BlackBerry 7 OS. The SDK takes advantage of the advanced hardware found under the hood of the new Bold Touch such as the magnetometer, NFC, video capture, and Open GL .
Scheduled for release at the end of May, the SDK also has some new APIs on the software side of things like Unified Search, maps, menu items, multimedia, barcodes and options.
The BlackBerry Bold 9900 and 9930 are slated for release summer 2011, this SDK update will allow developers to optimize their apps for the powerful new device.
Read more about the Java SDK Beta at Inside BlackBerry
Posted on May 4, 2011, at 3:21 PM .
Poynt now allows users to pair their BlackBerry smartphone to their BlackBerry Playbook Tablet. With the pairing, you can browse listings and maps on your roomy Playbook screen while initiating calls to businesses, adding contacts to the address book and more on your BlackBerry.
Poynt users can search for businesses, people, movies, events, restaurants, gas prices and weather information in their local area. When users locate a listing that interests them they can click to get a map, get directions, look up movie times, access movie trailers, browse restaurant reviews and book dinner reservations all within the Poynt app.
View the press release after the jump.
Continue reading ‘Poynt Launches Pairing for Playbook’
Posted on May 3, 2011, at 3:11 PM .
I caught up with the folks at Unsubscribe.com who have just launched their BACN unsubscription app for BlackBerry. Unsubscribing is not always the easiest of processes and they have found that users procrastinate managing the marketing emails that they’ve signed for by deleting the message immediately.
Unsubscribe.com solves this problem by adding an “unsubscribe” option in the BlackBerry menu. When you find an email that you no longer want updates to, select it and then hit unsubscribe in the menu. Unsubscribe.com will use their database to properly inform the company of your wishes. They also put pressure on offenders who do not have an easily accessible unsubscription option.
In a world where BACN is the new SPAM, Unsubscribe.com is the new SPAM blocker.
Download the Unsubscibe.com app for BlackBerry
Posted on May 3, 2011, at 12:03 PM .
The above is a really awesome 3D game called Samurai II that will be available on the PlayBook. Not an Android app but was showcased during the same keynote and got a great crowd response.
Mike Lazaridis took the stage to showcase some Android apps running on the PlayBook and we were simply blown away. For a long time we were asking ourselves how Android apps would run, and we knew that these apps had to feel native in order to be successful. The demo we saw today showed just that: Android apps running on the PlayBook with a completely native look and feel.
Android apps sit on the PlayBook’s homescreen just like any other app. You tap the icon to open the app and it boots up just as you would see it on an Android tablet. What’s incredible about the way RIM has implemented Android apps is the way they’ve replaced the standard Android Home, Back and Menu buttons with the PlayBook’s swipe gestures. For example, rather than press an Options button, Android apps use the bezel swipe from the top, making the apps, in some ways, better on the PlayBook than on an Android tablet. RIM’s approach to Android apps brings the PlayBook’s unique user experience, which can be described as “swipes” versus other tablets which are more “pokes”.
Continue reading ‘First Impressions of Android Apps on the BlackBerry PlayBook #BBWC’
Posted on May 3, 2011, at 11:50 AM .
Today during Mike Lazaridis’ keynote speech at BlackBerry World, Microsoft CEO Steve Balmer made a surprise appearance and announced a partnership between Microsoft and RIM. The partnership involves the integration of Microsoft’s Bing search engine into the Universal Search feature of the BlackBerry OS.
Slated for a holiday 2011 launch, the new search integration will be designed not just to search for text and relevancy, but to also utilize location and social graph to deliver highly contextual answers about your area before even needing to ask.
The developer leading the project Blaise Agüera y Arcas spoke of bringing search results “right to the glass”. He spoke of the search “completing a task” bringing useful information right to the user in a mobile context instead of prompting the user to sift through results.
This fine-tuning of the search will require less clicks to find what you are looking for; less clicks means time saved.
For more info about the announcement, check out Microsoft’s press release.
