Posted on June 10, 2011, at 4:02 PM .
Before and after
When I first heard of Contacts Cleaner over a year ago, the app was decent but it really wasn’t what I wanted it to be. I found that even after initializing the app and letting it clean my contacts, I still had many duplicates. Yesterday, I decided to give the app another try, grabbing it for $0.99 in App World and it was one of the best app purchases I have ever made. Considering what the app did for me, I’m still shocked at the incredibly low price point. In my address book, Contacts Cleaner found over 35,000 entries and 15,000 duplicates. These duplicates were ruining my Address Book and stem from the fact that I have around 15 Google Apps accounts connected to my device and downloading contacts. Having this many duplicates makes the Universal Search useless for contacts, because you have to still search through your Address Book and figure out which contact is the right one. I also have Xobni installed and while Xobni works great when you’re in your email, making telephone calls from inside the Phone App doesn’t access Xobni. You still need to have your contacts cleaned so that you can make quick calls from inside the Phone App.
Continue reading ‘Contacts Cleaner Review: A Must-Have Application for Anyone with Lots of Contacts’
Posted on June 10, 2011, at 3:07 PM .
Image via G&M
Poynt has announced a partnership with WiLAN that will see WiLAN assist Poynt in the licensing of Poynt’s portfolio of patents related to internet advertising. In Poynt Corporation’s patent portfolio are patents relating to advertising and location and being able to serve ads based on location context. This is a market that’s growing very quickly and becoming more important with the ubiquity of smartphones. WiLAN is a company that specializes in licensing rights to intellectual property and patents so the deal makes a lot of sense. WiLAN also has a lot of technology partners in the laptop and mobile space, so we may see some white label and embedded technology potential with this deal.
UPDATE: It’s also cool to note that Poynt has passed 8 million users across 7 countries.
Posted on June 10, 2011, at 1:30 PM .
Rogers has announced that Ottawa will be the first city in Canada to experience LTE. On top of this, Rogers is starting to take reservations for the first LTE enabled device, Sierra Rocket Stick through the Rogers Reservation System which can be accessed through MyRogers. This system allows you to secure a place “in line” for the device without having to visit a store or call first.
How do you feel about LTE? Do you really need faster speeds on your BlackBerry or laptop? 3G is a really decent connection to get business done, unless you’re streaming HD video. If you’re on the go, you’re probably roaming, in which case you don’t want to be streaming large movie files anyways. There are probably a handful of people who will benefit tremendously from LTE, but it doesn’t seem like the average consumer really needs it.
You can read more about this announcement on the Rogers RedBoard or sign up at IwantmyLTE.ca to be notified when LTE is coming to your area.
Posted on June 9, 2011, at 4:34 PM .
The tablet form factor is a bit of an anomaly. Do you really need a tablet between your smartphone and your computer? There are a handful of times when the tablet is a better form factor than a laptop and one of those is when reading. RSS feeds and eBooks are great on a tablet and while there are a handful of RSS readers in App World, it’s cool to see the BlackBerry News app in there as well. With the News app, a user can consolidate and access all of their RSS feeds within one app on the BlackBerry PlayBook. New feeds can be easily added by browsing the content library, or searching for specific keywords or URLs.
The app also comes with pre-populated feeds from top news sites providing instant access to popular content from multiple providers on a variety of topics. Categories include: Arts & Entertainment, Business, Health & Lifestyle, News Headlines, Science & the Environment, Technology, and Travel.
The BlackBerry News app for the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet has been optimized for the PlayBook, and leverages the tablet’s gesture-based navigation including:
Continue reading ‘BlackBerry News 1.0 Now Available for the PlayBook Tablet’
Posted on June 8, 2011, at 2:44 PM .
At the Where 2.0 conference it was announced that Apple was secretly collecting the location of every iPhone and weren’t telling users. This led to a Senate hearing of Apple and Google execs who had to explain themselves and answer to why they are collecting the data without the user’s knowledge. Recently, SmrtGuard decided to do some digging around to see if RIM collects this same data for a BlackBerry, and yes they do. The difference is that RIM does it in a very transparent way that users can opt out of, which is exactly how Apple and Google should have done it.
Many of you have noticed this option but in case you haven’t, go to Options > Device > Location Settings and scroll down a little. There, you’ll see the Enable GPS option with a message that says: “Anonymously collects data to improve the speed and accuracy of future location services.” The intent is pretty clear and RIM is building a database of location data in order to be able to improve their software. RIM is explicit that the data is anonymous and give the user the ability to disable. Again, if Apple and Google had been this open about their location data collection, it probably wouldn’t have turned into such a debacle.
Read more over at SmrtGuard’s Resource Center where they’ll have regular content in the mobile security space.
