The voice of the BlackBerry community.
British Comedy is sometimes hard for North Americans to appreciate because of the thick accents and strange words from days of yore, but this is a clip that every BlackBerry user would appreciate. The clip comes from a preview of The One Ronnie, a show that features Ronnie Corbett in a variety of sketches. Enjoy!
Today was a real fluff day in terms of news but that’s okay because it’s Monday and you’re probably looking for a reason to avoid the daunting week ahead.
A UK church, under the leadership of Rev. Canon David Parrott, blessed a heap of gadgets such as laptops, BlackBerrys and various smartphones, on the altar of London’s 17th-century St. Lawrence Jewry church. An effort, he said, to remind the capital’s busy office workers that God’s grace can reach them in many ways.
Parrott said the blessing ceremony was an update of a traditional back-to-work ceremony called “Plow Monday,” in which villagers gathered to bless a symbolic farming implement dragged to the church’s door.
The BlackBerry Curve 8520 seems to be making the rounds faster than any other device in RIM’s product line. Virgin is the latest provider to pick up the device, making it available on a monthly service plan. The cheapest monthly service plan involves getting locked in for 2 years, and for 25 EUROS a month, you get 200 voice minutes and unlimited texts, mail and mobile internet. The word unlimited comes with a fair use policy though.
Police in Bedfordshire, UK, have recently completed a project to outfit 1,100 frontline officers with BlackBerry smartphones.
By rolling out the BlackBerry solution, officers are able to increase visibility in the community and improve operational efficiency. With a BlackBerry, a frontline officer can now access operation critical applications and systems. While on patrol, the BlackBerry empowered officer as remote access to the Police National Computer (PNC), the forces crime management system, intelligence database, warrants, Police National Legal Database and its custom-built briefings application.
It is estimated that a BlackBerry saves each officer half an hour to an hour each day. This means big savings during an economic time when the UK has admitted it will have to make tremendous cuts in public spending, which will inevitably affect the police budget.
The Bedfordshire police Inspector Jim Hitch says: “I liken this to the change from Police boxes to Police radio. That was a huge step and quite expensive and had its doubters who asked why we needed radios. What we’re moving to now with these devices is a similar sort of scenario. There are people doubting and asking why we need them but I think that will become clearer and we will depend on these devices more and more and wonder how we ever did without them.”
[Via]
The BlackBerry Curve 8520 has been announced in both the UK and North America today. The latest device in the Curve series is an evolutionary step for devices with a new trackpad and a rubber bezel.
The device should be available for purchase in the UK at the beginning of August and T-Mobile has set a launch date at August 5th. Just over a week away!
The BlackBerry 8520 features:
Personally, I thought the lack of a flash on the camera was strange. Why go all this way to build a consumer device, and leave out a key feature that consumers like?
Will you be trading in your BlackBerry Curve 83xx for the 8520?
EDITORS NOTE: This article was provided by Flash Networks to demonstrate how their optimization techniques speed up mobile browsing.
Only one-third of mobile Internet users are satisfied with the user experience. Speed of response is the number one complaint. As a result, operators are continuously competing to advertise the fastest download rates and invest significant resources in upgrading their networks. How much of this investment is really reflected in the end user experience?
Available bandwidth vs. actual speed
Research conducted in the UK in June 2009 by broadband benchmarking firm, Epitiro, revealed that the average download rate in high speed networks (HSDPA) in the UK is just under 1 Mbit/s (0.9 Mbit/s, to be exact), only 24% of the advertised download speed and 34% slower than speeds achieved on equivalent ADSL broadband services.
While bandwidth dramatically increases as networks evolve, website download time is not reduced to the same extent. In a comparison of HSDPA 7.2 with HSDPA 3.6, download time was reduced by only 6% (based on lab results from large Asia Pacific mobile operator), demonstrating that bandwidth is not the main bottleneck anymore.
Click through to continue reading about the discrepancy between the user experience and bandwidth
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