Posted on July 17, 2008, at 1:09 PM .
If you really dug the standard Icon iBerry theme, Bplay just busted out a Today version of the iBerry Blackberry theme, letting you get a better view of your incoming messages, meetings and calls on your home screen. On top of that, you get four of your top apps shown in a bottom dock, just like the classic iPhone style. For the full-blown Macophile, the Finder theme has also returned, featuring a familiar bottom dock and icon set. Of course, the iBerry theme might be admitting some defeat to the iPhone hype, wouldn’t it? You could always scope out the re-released Crossbar theme, or some other fresh Next Gen themes like Reflex Today Plus.
Posted on July 17, 2008, at 8:08 AM .
The battle of the titans has commenced, and the first to the fight is Boy Genius who put the iPhone 3G against the soon-to-be-released BlackBerry Bold. Factors such as enterprise functionality, build quality, e-mail, keyboard, design and battery life are taken were taken into account for the review. At the end of the day, it was a pretty locked fight, even when it came to the screen. The review states that the BlackBerry Bold is second even to the 8800′s build quality, which really disconcerts me, having used an 8800 for a good long time and being generally impressed by its sturdiness. The application round went to the iPhone, which RIM should be downright ashamed of. They’ve been in the mobile game for so much longer that they should have gotten it right by now. Of course, Apple has an established relationship with developers for their computer segment, which provided a solid foundation to work with. Regardless, it’s a great review and worth checking out.
(via BGR, image via Slate)
Posted on July 14, 2008, at 11:37 AM .
Call it mixed signals, call it a slightly confused source, or call it one too many Rogers iPhone 3G price points. Whatever you want to call it, it appears that we goofed last week when we told you that Rogers was opting to sell the nascent BlackBerry Bold at $199 on a three-year contract. While the Bold will still match the iPhone 3G in pricing, it will be for the 16GB model, not the 8GB model, which retails at $299 on a three year contract. We were told, however, that the price could drop as low as $199 by Christmas, due to increased smartphone demand from consumers, and well, competition from the iPhone. Consider us half right.
We were also able to learn that RIM shipped Rogers a final build of OS 4.6 early last week, which is surprising considering Rogers also hosted multiple BlackBerry Bold launch parties for corporate customers at the same time. What can we learn from this? Well, one more barrier to getting the BlackBerry Bold in our hot little hands has been checked off the list. Also, the fact that OS 4.6 wasn’t even final before Rogers was throwing parties for the Bold explains why reader ‘Rogers Guy’ was telling us that Rogers was only giving away coupons for the Bold rather than the device itself.
(Thanks to SingStar Hero for the tip!)
Posted on July 12, 2008, at 8:32 PM .
It certainly wasn’t a quiet week at BlackBerry Cool HQ. With barely any time to recover from back-to-back national holidays, we learned that Bell and Telus are trying to charge us for incoming SMS, the BlackBerry Thunder may not be the BlackBerry Thunder, and the BlackBerry Javelin may be here before Christmas. Oh, and let’s not forget the release of the sequel to the most hyped mobile device, ever.
On the home front, Simon was able to piece together the mother of all BlackBerry IM client reviews while also providing an in-depth guide to everything you’d want to know about The Smartphone Challenge (trust us, this is something you want to know about).
Sorry for the late post, but it was so we could debut our wicked new podcast banner. You’ll find podcast downloading/streaming options, as well as links to all the relevant posts, after the jump. Enjoy!
Click here to listen to the BlackBerry Cool Podcast
Posted on July 11, 2008, at 4:03 PM .
“I waited in line for 15 hours and all I got were unicorns and this lousy tee shirt!”
Some of you might not know about QuicklyBored, our sister site that covers all things mobile entertainment. Yesterday, QB Editor in Chief, Kyle McInnes, stayed up all night in line to buy an iPhone 3G, braving a storm that hit the Ottawa area, only to come back to work and blog about it. We’d like to give props to our resident Apple fanboy co-worker by pointing you to some of the more interesting pieces of content about his journey.
Buying an iPhone 3G – A Night to Remember
Kyle Goes Insane on Twitter
iPhone 3G Unboxing Pictures
But don’t worry, we still know how our bread is buttered. Check out a little bit of (humorous) BlackBerry love after the jump.
Click here to see Kyle’s true colors…
Posted on July 11, 2008, at 2:06 PM .
After seeing Gizmodo’s video of MobileMe’s push e-mail in action, we definitely got a little spooked as to how much of a dent the iPhone 3G could put into BlackBerry. If you take into account Exchange support, aggressive marketing, developer love through the new iTunes app store, it’s pretty much impossible to keep pretending that the iPhone and BlackBerry are mutually exclusive. The only real question left is where will the iPhone hit hardest? The easy answer is the consumer market, but there’s lots of room for enterprise to start adopting. RIM still has mad seniority, and the BlackBerry Bold will easily match the iPhone 3G feature point for feature point – will that be enough for RIM to maintain smartphone dominance, or is Apple going to start getting a bigger a slice of the pie? Drop a comment with the best damage assessment and get not only an extra-spiffy BlackBerry Cool T-Shirt, but also a year of SugarSync – let’s just hope they don’t make an iPhone app anytime soon.
Last week’s winner behind the jump!
