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BlackBerry Bold Launches Thursday in Canada

admin — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 11:19:10 +0000

by Reuters

TORONTO - Rogers Communications Inc, the owner of Canada’s biggest wireless carrier, will start offering Research In Motion Ltd’s new BlackBerry Bold on Thursday, the Globe and Mail reported on its Web site.

The Bold is RIM’s most advanced smartphone to date and is the first BlackBerry to support high-speed HSDPA cellular networks. It comes with integrated GPS, Wi-Fi and a host of multimedia features.

RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie told Reuters in May that the smartphone, aimed at the company’s base of business users, will cost between $300 and $400. AT&T will be its lead carrier in the United States.

The Globe and Mail reported on Monday that Rogers confirmed the device will go on sale on Thursday. Rogers did not immediately return a call seeking comment.

The smartphone is expected to be available with carriers around the world by the end of this week.

The Bold features the most vivid display ever on a BlackBerry, a 2-megapixel camera with video recording capability, and a media player for watching movies and managing music collections.

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Google experimenting with voice search on Google Maps for BlackBerry Pearl

admin — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 16:55:28 +0000

BlackBerry Pearl (8110, 8120 and 8130 models) owners in the U.S. can now use their voice to search on Google Maps. The speech recognition technology used is the same as the one on Google’s free directory assistance service, GOOG0411.

Google Maps for mobile team argues that the new feature is very useful, especially in situations when you can’t type, don’t know how to spell the name of the business/street, or the name itself is too long.

To try out the new feature, point the BlackBerry Pearl’s browser to www.google.com/gmm to download the latest version of the application. Afterwards, follow the three easy steps:

Press “0″ to center the map view around your location.
Press the left-side key and hold it while you say the name or type of business you’re looking for (for example, “pizza”).
When you’re done speaking, release the left-side key, and Google’s mambo-jumbo will figure out what you said and find the business you’ve been looking for.
One thing to note, though, is that at the moment this feature is experimental, which means the accuracy of voice recognition will improve over time as more people start using it.

Read more from the source here

BlackBerry Bold hitting Rogers Wireless on July 25th

admin — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 16:53:43 +0000

Canadians may be among the first to get their hands on the upcoming BlackBerry Bold. Ok, John Mayer was first (among the first few, actually), but the close second isn’t that bad at all. Apparently, and this is not 100% confirmed, Rogers Wireless will start selling the new BlackBerry starting from July 25th!

If that’s true — and we honestly hope it is — select launch party invites may actually return home with the device to give it a try even before the rest of Canada. Don’t blame the whole country - blame the party invites.

As for the U.S. we’re still waiting to hear anything more specific from AT&T.

Read more from the source here

BlackBerry Curve 8350 in works for Nextel?

admin — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 16:50:11 +0000

RIM is reportedly preparing another BlackBerry for Nextel’s iDEN network. And while you may wonder why would they invest their resources in iDEN, the fact stays that for people looking for push-to-talk service - Nextel rules. In addition, Nextel’s service is still being used extensively by some industries, which RIM may want to target as well.

Apparently, the Canadian handset maker will make the WiFi-enabled BlackBerry Curve 8350 for Nextel by the end of the year, though it may slip to early 2009. And that’s about all we know at this stage.

I can understand RIM wants to expand its market share by targeting as larger audience as possible. However, I don’t quite dig RIM’s idea to unveil the Curve to iDEN network users at the end of this year. Not that Curve is not a great device, on the contrary it gained quite a following, but the idea to introduce the Curve at the end of the same year when Bold and Thunder are introduced is kinda weird. Then again, Nextel’s users don’t have much choice anyways.

Read more from the source here

BlackBerry Thunder will arrive as BlackBerry 9500 -Cell Phone News and Reviews

admin — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 19:28:52 +0000

BlackBerry Thunder is rumored to steal the thunder out of many of the current touchscreen smart devices being the first touchscreen BlackBerry phone. It has finally been assigned its model number. According to Boy Genius Report, Thunder will be known as BlackBerry 9500. It will have Verizon and Vodafone as carriers in USA and Europe respectively. Scheduled for the third quarter launch this year, BlackBerry 9500 is a full touchscreen phone with 360×480-pixel display devoid of slider keyboard and only 4 physical keys – the send key, end key, menu key and the back key. It is expected to be a hybrid model with CDMA and EV-DO as well as GSM and HSPA. It will feature the OS 4.7.0.

Read more from the source here

Experiencing T-Mobile - BlackBerry outage? Cell Phone News and Reviews

admin — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 12:06:38 +0000

the die-hard push-email fanatics out there. Which makes it all the more impressive when any BlackBerry service outage is announced ahead of time.

T-Mobile has announced that they’re are in the process of updating their BlackBerry Internet Email system to version 2.5. And, outages are coming hard and fast. BlackBerry users on T-Mobile’s network are already experiencing their first stretches of dead air.

Outages should end tomorrow morning (June 29) at 3am PST.

In the meantime, any going through BlackBerry email withdrawal can hit up our comments section and vent your frustrations and/or pain.

But hey, at least you’ll end up with BIS 2.5 and some sweet HTML, MSN and Hotmail support, AOL push-email support.

Read more from the source here

BlackBerry Kickstart and Seawolf get official model numbers

admin — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 11:08:28 +0000

There is unconfirmed news that the two much awaited BlackBerry mobile phones have been assigned their model numbers. BlackBerry Kickstart is BlackBerry 8220 and BlackBerry Seawolf will be BlackBerry 8210. While official information on the specifications of both the models has not been released, we have no other options than to depend upon rumors to get a glance of what these models would adorn.

Kickstart is supposed to be RIM’s flip phone of this year. It will have a SureType keyboard, two LCD displays and of course a camera. It is also expected to use the TrackBall for navigation. As for the BlackBerry Seawolf, according to the rumormongers, it will be the GPS version of the Kickstart.

Read more from the source here

BlackBerry 8820 replaces the 8800 model on Rogers Wireless

admin — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 15:56:16 +0000

While we’re waiting for the BlackBerry 9000 series, Rogers has discontinued the old BlackBerry 8800, only to replace it with the more powerful 8820 model. The newly launched device (at least on Rogers), builds on top of 8800’s specs adding WiFi connectivity to the mix.

The Blackberry 8820 is already available on the largest Canadian mobile operator and could be yours for CA$349 on a three-year contract (special promo price). The price goes up if you decide to bind yourself with a shorter-term contract — with a two-year term, the 8820 could be yours for CA$499, while a single year contract makes the device cost CA$549.

Read more from the source here

Blackberry gets yet another IM: Mundu version 4

admin — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 13:15:00 +0000

Blackberry smartphone seems to be bombarded with instant messengers and the latest amongst them is Mundu version 4. Unlike many other IMs you can chat with your friends who are clients of other messengers like the Windows Live, Yahoo, ICQ, AIM, Google Talk and Jabber. A special feature that you will really welcome is the multi-client or cross conferencing facilities in which you can just have one chat window open and invite all your friends to join the conversation. You don’t need to engage in a boring one to one conversation any more. You can have a great time communicating with all your friends simultaneously.

I think this feature is going to be of great help even in a formal interaction where you can engage in a sort of a mini-meeting with your workplace acquaintances. It seems to be an easy, quick and convenient alternative to videoconferencing. The company is ready to allow you to try the messenger out for 5 days before you take a decision to buy it and it is available for a lifetime subscription of only $11 USD. It is ready for downloading on the Internet. Can you ask for a better deal?

Read more from the source here