Pulse2 Technology and Social Media News » BlackBerry

BlackBerry Curve 9320 To Have BB OS 7.1, 2.44-Inch Display, and BBM Button

Amit Chowdhry — Wed, 09 May 2012 17:18:08 +0000

Research In Motion has announced the BlackBerry Curve 9320. The specs include BB OS 7.1, 3.2-megapixel camera, 2.44-inch 320×240 non-touch LCD display, 1450mAh battery, FM radio, and QWERTY form factor. The phone is small and weighs only 103 grams. The phone also has microSD expandability beyond the 512MB of eMMC. The 9320 has a dedicated BBM key on the side. The 9220 is only 2 megapixels and there is no flash. U.K. carriers will offer the device from PAYG for £140 ($225) starting May 14th and T-Mobile UK will have a 24-month contract option at £15.50 per month. Check out the press release below:

RIM introduces the BlackBerry Curve 9320 – A Stylish, New Smartphone for the Socially-Connected

Waterloo, ON – Research In Motion (RIM) (NASDAQ: RIMM; TSX: RIM) today announced a stylish new smartphone for socially-connected customers. The new BlackBerry® Curve™ 9320 smartphone features all the core BlackBerry messaging and social-centric features that keep people connected, and it offers global 3G connectivity backed by long battery life to allow users to make the most of their day.

“The new BlackBerry Curve 9320 is designed to make it incredibly easy for users to stay socially-connected,” said Carlo Chiarello, EVP, Smartphone Business at Research In Motion. “The new BlackBerry Curve 9320 will be especially popular with customers upgrading to a smartphone for the first time and existing Curve customers looking for a step up in speed and functionality.”

The BlackBerry Curve 9320 has everything a customer needs to stay in touch with the people and things that matter most to them. It features a dedicated BBM™ key, bringing the power of RIM’s popular mobile social network up in an instant, as well as the best keyboard in its class for quick and easy typing. It includes a built-in FM radio, allowing users to tune into their favorite local stations, and listening to the FM radio does not require a data plan or use data services. Designed to allow both 3G connectivity and long battery life, customers can get up to 7 hours of talk time or up to 30 hours of FM radio listening or music playback with headphones.

Customers can easily interact with their social network in real time, using preloaded apps for Facebook® and Twitter®. The new Social Feeds 2.0 app is also preloaded, allowing users to post updates to multiple social networks simultaneously and capture updates from news sources (RSS), social apps and instant messaging apps all in one consolidated view. The integrated camera includes a flash and supports video recording, and pictures can be tagged with their location thanks to the smartphone’s built-in GPS.

The BlackBerry Curve 9320 comes with the new BlackBerry® 7.1 OS, which supports features such as Mobile Hotspot and Wi-Fi® calling where available.* Parental Controls is a brand new, on-device feature that provides parents and guardians with simple options to help protect children by restricting access to specific functions, features and applications.

Pricing and availability of the BlackBerry Curve 9320 will be announced in conjunction with RIM’s distribution partners. For more information please visit: http://worldwide.blackberry.com/blackberrycurve/9220-9320

* Please check with your carrier for availability.

RIM Showcases New Apps and Dev Unit At BlackBerry World 2012

Amit Chowdhry — Tue, 01 May 2012 15:03:12 +0000

Above is a photo of RIM’s official dev unit for the BlackBerry 10 platform. The dev unit is a 4.2-inch and 1280 x 768 display. The phone has 16GB internal storage and 1GB of RAM. New RIM CEO Thorsten Heins was the host of the event. People representing 150 countries were in the audience.

About 87% of BlackBerry users utilize social networking per day. There are 55 million BlackBerry Messenger subscribers and 77 million BlackBerry users around the world.

Heins said that the company has designers working on BlackBerry 10. “We want to make sure we get it right,” said Heins. The final hardware and software will be coming later this year.

Some of the features of BlackBerry 10 include:
- Easy sliding gestures to switch apps.
- Everything runs real-time in the background.
- The touch-keyboard uses predictive algorithms. You can swipe down to go to different keyboard layouts.
- Autocorrect words are displayed next to the key that you naturally have to type next. When you swipe across the keyboard, you will see the words disappear.

RIM also showed BlackBerry 10 connected to a car. “This car in itself is a connected ecosystem. It has screens in the back for video conferencing or gaming. It’s all run by BB10,” stated RIM head of software portfolio Vivek Bhardwaj.

Meet The One BlackBerry Retail Store In North America

Amit Chowdhry — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 16:56:58 +0000

On Orchard Lake Rd., one of the busiest roads connecting Farmington Hills and West Bloomfield, Michigan sits a stand-alone BlackBerry store. This store has been open for 5 years. “The store has two full-time employees and is stocked with accessories. For new customers, there is a BlackBerry training room in the back of the store with a whiteboard and a conference table. A television set in the corner, plugged into a PlayBook tablet, displayed a roaring fireplace,” wrote Will Connors of The Wall Street Journal. The BlackBerry retail store is run by Wireless Giant, who pitched RIM on the concept of opening up 100 retail stores. RIM was hit hard by ruthless competition and the global economy as a whole so they ended up just keeping this one retail store. Even though RIM is not as popular as Android and iOS in North America, they are still doing well abroad. This is why the next BlackBerry retail store will be opened up in Dubai and there are four operating in Jakarta, Indonesia.

Netflix Not Planning To Bring Streaming Service To PlayBook or BlackBerry

Amit Chowdhry — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 20:25:28 +0000

Streaming movie and DVD-mail rental company Netflix doesn’t have any plans to bring their streaming service to RIM’s BlackBerry or PlayBook devices. “We don’t have any current plans to support BlackBerry devices, including PlayBook,” said Netflix on Twitter.

Netflix has been available on the iPhone, iPad, and Android devices for a long time now. Netflix made the announcement despite RIM recently updating the PlayBook to the second version of the operating system to include e-mail support. Netflix currently has over 24 million U.S. subscribers.

Image Of BlackBerry 10 AKA London Leaks

Amit Chowdhry — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 21:17:25 +0000

Last week the 2012 BlackBerry Roadmap slide deck was leaked. The leaked Roadmap document included a photo of the BlackBerry 10 smartphone. The image of the slide above contains some details of BlackBerry “London” also known as BlackBerry 10.

This might not be the final design of BlackBerry 10 because another image of BlackBerry London leaked in November, but it doesn’t look like the image above. The first photo had angular edges and looked more like the Porsche Design P’9981 Smartphone by BlackBerry.

The BlackBerry London user interface above looks like a phone-version of the BlackBerry PlayBook OS. As you can tell, there are rounded corners and an all-black look. CrackBerry.com has it that BlackBerry 10 will run on TI OMAP5 and Qualcomm chipsets being tested on 1.5GHz dual core processors.

Amazon.com Considered Acquiring RIM This Past Summer

Amit Chowdhry — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 05:04:42 +0000

Research In Motion Limited (TSE:RIM) has turned down take-over offers in the past, but one of the most interesting was from Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN). RIM knows that they have been having problems with maintaining a solid market share, but they prefer to get better as an independent. This past summer, Amazon.com hired an investment bank to review a potential merger with RIM. A formal offer was never made.

As of right now, RIM does is not interested in a joint venture or an outright sale, despite the interest. However RIM is still discussing ways to expand commercial ties with different companies, which include making Amazon.com’s music catalog available on BlackBerry devices.

RIM has a lot of work to do in order to survive. The company’s value dropped 77% in the past 12 months to about $6.8 billion as the company had kept reporting disappointing quarterly reports. Weak sales of the PlayBook have been cited as well. Some corporate and private equity companies are waiting for RIM’s value to drop even further before making a move too.

Another idea is for RIM to license out the QNX operating system in late 2010 after BlackBerry 10 launches. QNX could be an alternative for smartphone manufacturers to use instead of Android. But smartphone manufacturers such as HTC and Samsung already have licensing agreements with Google and currently do not see value in striking a partnership with RIM. This means that RIM would really have to provide a lot of incentives to smartphone manufacturing companies to even be considered a blip on Android and iOS’ radar.

[Reuters]

RIM’s Profits Are Down 71% In Q3 Due To PlayBook

Amit Chowdhry — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 02:10:11 +0000

Research In Motion Limited (TSE:RIM) has announced their third quarter earnings earlier today. RIM reported $265 million in earnings, which is 51 cents per share for the quarter. This is down 71% from $911 million during the same quarter a year ago. The reason for the drop is because of the $485 million hit RIM took due to unsold PlayBook tablets.

There is also a $54 million charge the company took when they had a worldwide outage this past fall. RIM’s overall revenue is down only 6% at $5.17 billion from $5.5 billion last year. About 14.1 million BlackBerry smartphones and about 150,000 PlayBooks were shipped in the quarter. RIM said that they plan on shipping about 11 and 12 million more smartphones in the next 3 months.

[Barrons]

Google Ending Support For Gmail App For BlackBerry

Amit Chowdhry — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 16:47:38 +0000

Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) will no longer support the Gmail App for BlackBerry (installed native app) on November 22, 2011. Users can continue using the app, but it will not be supported by Google any longer. BlackBerry users can continue accessing Gmail through the mobile web app at http://www.gmail.com through the BlackBerry web browser. [Google Apps Update]

RIM’s BlackBerry Services Disrupted For Millions of Users During Past 3 Days

Amit Chowdhry — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 18:16:22 +0000

There has been a 3 day disruption of BlackBerry services that spread to North America today. This has caused frustration to millions of BlackBerry users. RIM has advised their clients about an outage happening in the Americas and they are currently trying to restore services in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and India.

According to RBC, about half of BlackBerry’s 70 million users could be affected by the disruptions. “The messaging and browsing delays … were caused by a core switch failure within RIM’s infrastructure,” said RIM in a company statement. “As a result, a large backlog of data was generated and we are now working to clear that backlog and restore normal service.” The disruption has not been this bad since two years ago when a similar incident occurred.

Below are a few tweets from the company:

[blackbirdpie url="http://twitter.com/#!/BlackBerryHelp/status/123437227324870658"]

[blackbirdpie url="http://twitter.com/#!/BlackBerry/status/123859231484030977"]

[blackbirdpie url="http://twitter.com/#!/BlackBerry/status/124132725887209473"]

BlackBerry Curve 9350 Coming To Sprint For $49.99 On September 9

Amit Chowdhry — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 14:56:33 +0000

Earlier this week, Sprint announced that they will be launching the BlackBerry Curve 9350 smartphone which has the candy bar design, GPS, WiFi, 5 megapixel camera, and BlackBerry 7 operating system. The 9350 will be available on Sprint on September 9th for $79.99 with a two year contract. Sprint’s business customers may be able to buy the phone for $49.99 after a $50 mail-in rebate. Press release below:

BlackBerry Curve 9350 Debuts Sept. 9
for Just $79.99 from Sprint

Stunning new BlackBerry Curve 9350 is fast, affordable, easy-to-use, full-featured and socially connected

OVERLAND PARK, Kan. – Aug. 23, 2011 – The next generation of Research In Motion’s (RIM) (NASDAQ: RIMM; TSX: RIM) popular BlackBerry® Curve™ series of smartphones, the stunning new BlackBerry Curve 9350, comes to Sprint (NYSE: S) on Friday, Sept. 9, offering the latest BlackBerry operating system – BlackBerry® 7. The new BlackBerry Curve 9350 is a fast, affordable, easy-to-use, full-featured and socially connected smartphone that is as beautiful as it is functional.

The slim and stylish smartphone will cost just $79.99 (excluding taxes) with a new line or eligible upgrade and two-year service agreement, after a $50 mail-in rebate via reward card1 and be available in all Sprint sales channels, including Sprint Stores, Business Sales, Telesales (1-800-SPRINT1) and web sales (www.sprint.com). Sprint Business customers may qualify to get BlackBerry Curve 9350 for $49.99 (excluding taxes) on a business account with a new line or eligible upgrade and new one- or two-year service agreement, after a $50 mail-in rebate via reward card1.

“It is exciting to see the BlackBerry Curve line continue to evolve, building upon past success,” said David Owens, vice president – Product Development, Sprint. “This latest iteration offers the recognizable form factor our customers have come to enjoy, while adding powerful new features and innovative apps of BlackBerry 7 to deliver the smoothest and fastest BlackBerry Curve experience to date.”

The BlackBerry Curve 9350 smartphone offers a full QWERTY keyboard and trackpad for easy one-handed navigation and keeps users connected by allowing them to easily share moments through pictures and videos via MMS, as well as by instant message with world-class IM services like BBM™ (BlackBerry® Messenger). With easy access to social networking sites like Flickr®, MySpace and Facebook®, this smartphone provides smooth integration to keep users up to speed on what’s happening in their personal and professional lives.

Key features include:

BlackBerry App World™, the official app store front for BlackBerry smartphones offering customization, fun and productivity
Near Field Communications (NFC) support for a secure exchange of information between NFC-enabled devices over a very short distance
5MP camera with HD video capture, flash and zoom
512MB RAM
2GB microSD card included, with support for up to 32GB microSD card
BlackBerry PlayBook support with BlackBerry Bridge™ (BlackBerry Bridge is available as a free download on BlackBerry App World)
DataViz Docs To Go® Premium suite preloaded, for editing Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint files from anywhere
Wi-Fi® (802.11 b/g/n)
Bluetooth® 2.1+EDR support
Smoother and Faster with BlackBerry 7

With BlackBerry 7, the BlackBerry Browser is significantly enhanced to provide a faster and more fluid user experience and includes optimized HTML5 performance for incredible gaming and video experiences.

Building upon the Universal Search feature introduced in BlackBerry 6, BlackBerry 7 expands the capability to include voice-activated search. This new capability makes it easier and more convenient to search for content on the smartphone or web.

BlackBerry 7 also integrates BlackBerry® Balance™, which separates personal content from corporate content, giving users the freedom and flexibility to use the smartphone for personal email, Facebook®, Twitter®, multimedia, games and other apps, while satisfying the very real need for corporate data to be highly secure and manageable. BlackBerry Balance works in conjunction with BlackBerry® Enterprise Server 5.0.3, which provides a number of unique IT policy controls, such as wiping only corporate data or blocking work-related content and apps from being copied or forwarded to personal contacts.

BlackBerry Curve 9350 requires activation on one of Sprint’s Everything Data plans plus a required $10 Premium Data add-on charge for smartphones. Sprint’s Everything Data plan with Any Mobile, AnytimeSM includes unlimited web, texting and calling to and from any mobile in America while on the Sprint Network, starting at just $69.99 per month plus required $10 Premium Data add-on charge – a savings of $40 per month versus Verizon’s comparable plan with unlimited talk, text and 2GB web or $10 per month versus Verizon’s 450-minute plan with unlimited text and 2GB web. (Pricing excludes taxes and surcharges.)

Sprint was unbeaten among major wireless carriers for customer satisfaction according to results from the 2011 American Customer Satisfaction Index. In addition to tying for first place among wireless carriers, Sprint was also the number one most improved company in customer satisfaction, across all industries, during the last three years, according to the survey.

[BGR]