The voice of the BlackBerry community.
IDC have announced the top selling smartphones in America and BlackBerry accounted for 5 of the top 10. While this is pretty significant, I’m sure RIM isn’t too happy about growth rates. RIM was significantly stronger than its competitors in terms of pure sales, but Apple’s growth far outpaced all others, with a unit sales increase of 97.7% in Q4 of 2009. Overall in 2009, Apple still dominates in terms of growth by 81.9% compared to RIM’s 46.2%.
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This week we got more details about the upcoming BlackBerry Pearl 9100 which should be hitting carriers soon. We also have a ton of app news and some good editorial content. I think next week we’ll see more about the Pearl 9100 and the Tour2 9650 as we get closer to these devices launching.
Click through to get caught up on the past week in BlackBerry
RIM need a face for the BlackBerry brand and my vote is for Miranda Kerr. It’s Friday so anything goes when it comes to posts. Enjoy!
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Rob Woodbridge, President & CEO of Rove, has been interviewing wireless industry players for Untether.TV, a site that aims to bring to light the great successes, failures and lessons in order to help move the innovation needle forward in mobility/wireless. It’s always interesting to see entrepreneurs talk to other entrepreneurs, and I think there is a lot of value here, especially for anyone currently working on a startup.
Click through to check out the interviews
When I was in Scandinavia meeting with Opera, along with the lucky BBCool reader who won the trip, I got to talking with them about RIM’s acquisition of Torch Mobile. The guys at Opera are really smart and gave me some insight into what a browser really is. A browser is really a combination of 50-80 mini apps, that all serve various functions such as understanding the HTML/CSS. WebKit is a core technology within the browser. There are other core technologies that can be used to build a Browser: Presto, Gecko, Trident etc.
The acquisition of Torch Mobile meant that RIM now controls a few of the developers who are contributors to WebKit’s source code. The Webkit platform, while Open Source, doesn’t allow just anyone to manipulate the base code. There is a relatively small group of contributors from Apple, Nokia, Google, various Universities, and now RIM.
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You may find your BlackBerry running slowly and often times this can be resolved with a few simple steps. I’ve taken the time to write out these tips that should get your BlackBerry back up to speed. Remember, your BlackBerry is more like a computer than a phone, and it needs similar best practices for memory management and performance.
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Over the past year, mobile data has become a topic in the mainstream media. The stories are mostly about AT&T’s network growing pains, how iPhone users are overtaxing the networks and are experiencing greatly reduced bandwidth as a result.
Carriers love talking about bandwidth. It seems to be the only thing that matters in terms of mobile data. When the iPhone 3G came out, the dumbed-down line that was used to describe the difference between 2G and 3G in Apple’s marketing was that 3G is “twice as fast”.
I have been trying to make heads or tails of this whole data speed thing for quite some time. I had noticed in more than a few instances that 2G is just as fast, and sometimes faster than 3G. With all this marketing about how much faster 3G is, I set out to do a few tests of my own to determine if 3G is a must-have, or if carriers are trying to oversell the technology as a giant leap when it’s really just an incremental step.
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The most exciting news this week was definitely checking out the BlackBerry Magnum. It’s really a shame that this device will never see the light of day (sources tell us), but it’s still very possible that a touchscreen/QWERTY hybrid is in the cards. Even though the Magnum had no OS loaded on it, we could still see that it used SurePress, which in my opinion would have been a little awkward. On the other hand, the Bold 9000 form factor is one I sincerely miss and hope RIM brings it back.
For all of you who want the BlackBerry Cool wallpaper that I use for these posts, download it from the above image (large size here) and use our Wallpaper service to resize the image. Now lets get caught up on the news.
Click through to catch up on a week of BlackBerry news
Something not often talked about is iPhone users migrating to BlackBerry. Customer satisfaction among iPhone users is very high. The reason for such a good score is that relatively little goes wrong with an iPhone. The iPhone is both simple and elegant in it’s software and hardware design, making for a trouble-free, and rewarding user experience.
Apple has build their reputation marketing their products as the “alternative” to the woes of mainstream computing. Throughout the company’s history, there have been several ad campaigns inviting people to switch platforms to Apple. Having a platform focused on ease of use, simple OS design, and a small product lineup has made choosing Apples’ products a “no brainer” kind of choice. To the people who are easily frustrated by traditional computing, it’s a great platform that gives them real piece of mind.
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I’ve been watching the coverage of the iPad launch and I haven’t seen anything more than a large iPod Touch. It’s sort of cool to be able to use iPod Touch apps on a larger screen, and it will surely make the movie watching experience better, but there was far too much hype over this device.
While Mike Lazaridis doesn’t seem too elated about the idea of a tablet, and would probably not let RIM go down that path, it still could happen. With enough pressure from marketing, and if Apple make a fortune on the tablet, the financial incentive could be enough. I think the BlackBerry OS would be more conducive to a tablet because it comes with push notifications and multitasking, but there are a few things that need to happen at RIM first, before a tablet could really be successful.
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The voice of the BlackBerry community.
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