Friday, April 29, 2011

How to sync music, video, and photos with the BlackBerry PlayBook

Now that you have a new BlackBerry PlayBook™ tablet and you’re eager to load your favorite music, videos and photos from your BlackBerry® smartphone, PC or other devices, we want to point you to a powerful tool to make managing, transferring, and backing up files a snap: BlackBerry® Desktop Software. I had a chance earlier in the week to sit down with fellow Inside BlackBerry blogger Andrey about the latest version of BlackBerry Desktop Software and get a demo of how to sync media and create backups with the new BlackBerry PlayBook tablet. Check it out!

Here’s a quick checklist of some of the features BlackBerry Desktop Software offers for BlackBerry PlayBook tablet users:

BlackBerry PlayBook media sync (music/photos/videos)
BlackBerry PlayBook software updates notification with option to upgrade via USB
BlackBerry PlayBook device switch wizard to quickly transfer information (applications/media/settings/user data) between tablets
BlackBerry PlayBook backup and restore (applications/media/settings/user data), with automated backups and data encryption
CurrentBlackBerry Desktop Software users have already been notified of the updated version with BlackBerry PlayBook support. Those who missed the notification or haven’t used the software before can download it from our BlackBerry Desktop Software page.


Note: BlackBerry Desktop Software comes in both Mac and PC flavors. However, the Mac version of BlackBerry Desktop Software will not feature BlackBerry PlayBook tablet support at launch. Mac users can still move files to and from their BlackBerry PlayBook via USB or wireless transfer. Stay tuned for more info on an updated version of BlackBerry Desktop Software for Mac!

BlackBerry App World on BlackBerry PlayBook

For Team App World, the BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet is the beginning of a brand new chapter in the story of the BlackBerry App World storefront. I wanted to take the time today to give you a rundown on a variety of BlackBerry App World related news.

The BlackBerry PlayBook tablet brings some significant changes to BlackBerry App World. First, there’s the brand spanking new BlackBerry App World storefront. Built using the BlackBerry® PlayBook SDK for Adobe® AIR®, BlackBerry App World is your gateway to an array of games and apps. It’s been great to see the catalog grow since we opened up app submissions for the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet in December.

Each of these apps is built with either the Adobe AIR or BlackBerry WebWorks™ SDKs. We’ll soon be launching the new BlackBerry® Tablet OS Native SDK that will allow developers to build powerful and graphically rich apps for the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet. Two examples of apps built with the BlackBerry Tablet OS Native SDK actually come preloaded on your BlackBerry PlayBook: “Need for Speed: Undercover” and “Tetris” by Electronic Arts. Check out the below video to see Need for Speed in HD action!

Later this year, BlackBerry App World will be introducing support for Android® and BlackBerry® smartphone apps for the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet. You can read more about the app players and their benefits here!

Speaking of BlackBerry smartphone apps, I wanted to take a minute to talk about the apps you’ve previously downloaded or purchased on your BlackBerry smartphone and what will be available on your BlackBerry PlayBook tablet. As you may know, the apps on your BlackBerry smartphone are written in a different language than what is supported on the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet today. Because of this, not all of your smartphone apps are yet available for the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet.

Blackberry 8520 - Vlingo app review

If you find yourself in situations where using a phone is very hard, well, you might have just found a solution for that problem. Yes, I think that in most of these cases you’re probably driving and for that situation, you will find many alternatives. Anyway, this is one alternative and you should consider if it’s really worth it or not.
This alternative is called Vlingo as you can also see in the title. They developers of this app are saying about it that it’s a virtual assistant and they’re right about that.

The best free features are that you can search the web using Google or Yahoo!, call a contact, update your Facebook or Twitter account or have your e-Mails or text massages read aloud via SafeReader.

Probably the best paid features that are a really must have is that you can send a text or e-Mail message to anyone. The example they gave us is “Text Sarah; running a few minutes late”. The other two paid features is that you can dictate text into any text box like BBM or Yahoo and you can also get your calendar reminders aloud via SafeReaderTM.

The app is free and you can get it from the App World.

Friday, April 15, 2011

BlackBerry Smartphone Simulators Overview

For all you hard-working developers out there, the BlackBerry® Smartphone Simulator is an essential tool: it enables you to run BlackBerry® smartphone applications on your computer. The BlackBerry Smartphone Simulator includes the BlackBerry native applications that are typically available on BlackBerry smartphones, and enables you to load and test your own applications. You can even simulate and test various connectivity and state changes – definitely useful when you’re trying out a new app! When you use the BlackBerry Smartphone Simulator to perform testing, you might need to simulate additional BlackBerry services; the BlackBerry® Email and MDS Services Simulator Package are available for this purpose.

In short, the BlackBerry Smartphone Simulator allows you simulate all the aspects of the BlackBerry smartphone including battery conditions, network conditions, SD Card, GPS capabilities and more. In this post, I will briefly describe how to simulate some of the functionalities of the BlackBerry smartphone. Before we go further, let’s quickly recap where you can find the latest BlackBerry Smartphone Simulators. All the most up-to-date BlackBerry simulators can be found at the BlackBerry Smartphone Simulators page under the Developer Resources section of the website. You can also head here for the complete instructions on installation details, and you can find more detailed information on the BlackBerry Smartphone Simulators at the BlackBerry Documentation site.

NFS Undercover Game Review

I was very surprised and glad to see that this game is now also available in the App World for BlackBerry because it was available for most of the mobile platforms excepting BlackBerry but as you can see, Electronic Arts made a version for this platform too but let’s fall deeper into the details and see if it is really worth the money.

I want to say from the very first beginning that the graphics of this game are very poor but there are still some people who appreciate its graphics but that’s probably because they have never ever used a better platform before. My opinion is that a BlackBerry game developer should only focus on making the game interesting and not with advanced graphics as most of them try to do and of course that they all fail because let’s face it, BlackBerry OS can’t be compared to iOS or even Android.

They also say that this game is very challenging but as one of the reviewers say, it’s not challenging at all so they were very wrong about that. Besides these things, the “story” of the game is very similar to the other versions from the other platforms. The game costs $1.99 and you can get it from the app world.

Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Alarms app for BlackBerry 8520 Curve

I am that kind of person who loves perfection and I can’t stand if there is mess in my room, in my desktop, in my phone or anything like this. Actually, I like to have everything organized so this app we’re going to talk would help all person like me.

Anyway, this app just lets you set multiple alarms and categorize them in a very nice way so as you can see, it’s not that special as you might have thought. You can set an alarm without this app too so you might be wondering why would someone want to buy such an app?
Well, as I said, it keeps your alarms organized and you also get the chance of managing these alarms through an awesome interface.
The only thing I hate about this interface is that the clock covers the RIM logo and it looks like there is a bug. If that logo wouldn’t have been there, this app would have looked like it was designed by elecite or some other good designers team.
It has 4/5 stars with 23 reviews which is quite a high rate but we should wait and see some other reviews too. The app costs $1.99 and you can get it from the app world.

Twitter for BlackBerry v1.1 Officially Released!

Twitter for BlackBerry
Today marks the official launch of the Twitter® for BlackBerry® smartphones v1.1 application. This version – which our helpful BlackBerry Beta Zone users have been testing over the past six weeks – includes several new and exciting features, like adding a location to your Tweets and Push @Mentions. (Please note v1.1 will become available for download in BlackBerry App World™ over the next 24 hours. If you don’t see it listed immediately, please keep checking back!)
A big shout out to everyone who participated in the beta and provided their valuable feedback! Since the release of the beta version, the Twitter app team at Research In Motion® (RIM®) has been busy working on some additional improvements in response to feedback raised during the beta.
Let’s take a look at some of the new features in more detail so you can start using them!

Tweet Location
By enabling this feature, you can pinpoint your location in a neighborhood and include it your Tweets. To try out this feature, complete the following steps:
  1. Open Twitter for BlackBerry smartphones v1.1
  2. Press the Menu key and select Options
  3. Enable Add Location To Tweet and save your changes
After enabling this setting, you’ll notice a new compass icon that appears to the right of the photo icon below the Tweet box. To add your location, select this icon and your BlackBerry smartphone will determine where you are and add it to any new Tweets you submit. If you want to remove your location, simply select the icon again to disable this feature until you’re ready to use it again.
Viewing someone else’s location – if they have enabled this feature – is really easy too! All you need to do is select the location icon that appears in the bottom right corner of their tweet and a map view will open, allowing you to see where they were when they submitted that Tweet.
Twitter for BlackBerry v1.1
Other new features include Push @Mentions and #Topic Autocomplete, which were previously discussed in the Twitter v1.1 Beta post.
Refreshed Branding
We’ve made several changes to enhance the Twitter for BlackBerry smartphone experience, like updated graphics that reflect the new look of the Twitter brand and a streamlined layout of the Add Photo and Add Location icons on the Home screen.
Twitter for BlackBerry v1.1
Retweet Updates
The next time you Retweet something, it will appear in your Home timeline as ‘Retweeted by You’, to quickly alert you that your Retweet was sent successfully.
New language support
Twitter for BlackBerry smartphones now supports the following additional languages:
  • Simplified Chinese
  • Traditional Chinese
  • Polish
  • Czech
  • Thai
We’ve also made several changes to address feedback that we received from BlackBerry Beta Zone users reported during the Twitter for BlackBerry smartphones v1.1 beta. One of the issues we’ve addressed is the “Unable to Find Location” error message that appeared whenever a user attempted to submit a new tweet. We’ve also made some changes to ensure that you don’t encounter any difficulties when attempting to shorten a URL you’d like to share, or that you don’t experience delays when opening the Twitter app on your BlackBerry smartphone.
We always welcome your feedback, so please post a comment and let us know what you think about the latest version of Twitter for BlackBerry smartphones!

Saturday, April 9, 2011

Grow Baby Grow app for BlackBerry

I thought I should review an app which was released today and I did so. The app is called, as you can see, Grow Baby Grow and as its name says, this app allows you to make a journal for your baby.

BlackBerry App World Upgrade

Citizens of the BlackBerry® App World™ storefront! If you’re still using BlackBerry App World client version 1.1, this applies to you (everyone using BlackBerry App World version 2.0 and higher: check out this blog of puppies). Starting tonight, existing BlackBerry App World 1.1 users will be required to upgrade to the latest version of BlackBerry App World. This upgrade will affect only a small percentage of current BlackBerry App World users.

Wednesday, April 6, 2011

RIM’s expanded App Ecosystem: the benefits for customers and developers

BlackBerry PlayBook tablet

We recently announced plans to enable developers to leverage existing assets for the BlackBerry® Java® Development Environment and Android® platforms to be easily ported to the BlackBerry® Tablet OS via ‘application players’. The application player for supported Android apps will be available this summer, followed soon after by the application player for supported BlackBerry JDE apps. Both will be available through the BlackBerry App World™ storefront.

As a follow up to this announcement, I thought I’d devote a blog post to explain the benefits for our customers and developers. The bottom line is we continue to advance software technologies and other capabilities in order to offer the best platform for both users and developers.

What does this announcement mean for Customers?

For both consumer and business customers, this announcement reinforces our commitment to providing choice while bolstering our platform. Our customers will benefit from having access to highly optimized and integrated apps developed specifically for the BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet using BlackBerry tools, as well as a much bigger catalog of apps drawing from multiple other sources, such as the Adobe® Flash® and Adobe® AIR®, HTML5 and JavaScript® developer communities (as previously announced) – and now the Android developer community. And this is all being done through our BlackBerry App World storefront to manage the app discovery and download processes for consumers.

We are already hearing overwhelmingly positive customer feedback about the greater choice and flexibility that our broad approach will allow: the best apps built for the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet coupled with the “long tail” of apps built for the above-mentioned BlackBerry JDE and Android platforms.

What does this mean for Developers?

For the majority of developers, the way to go is still the BlackBerry platform and the widened set of tools we’ve made available. Only these can ensure that the developer harnesses the full power of the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet in terms of extremely rich graphics, full multitasking, and ultrafast processing. BlackBerry smartphone development options include the BlackBerry® WebWorks™ platform. BlackBerry WebWorks offers leading HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript support on a mobile platform. The BlackBerry WebWorks platform also supports modern web frameworks such as Sencha, PhoneGap, jQuery and Dojo.
BlackBerry PlayBook tablet development options currently include BlackBerry WebWorks as well as Adobe® (Flash® and AIR®).
RIM will add full tooling support for native C/C++ development for the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet over the coming months. We’re highly confident about this. The QNX team RIM acquired to develop our BlackBerry Tablet OS has won awards for its Eclipse-based native Integrated Development Environment (“IDE”).

Because of the app players we’re providing, if there are developers currently developing for the Android platform, they can now rapidly move onto our platform while they evaluate our other development paths. We can now offer such developers an on-ramp to package and distribute their apps to our growing customer base of consumers, enterprises and governments.

Going forward, we will continue to evolve our various development technologies to deliver the most powerful, flexible and open experiences for developers whether they choose to build with HTML5, Java®, Adobe Flash, Adobe AIR, or native C/C++. And for those developers using our BlackBerry platform tools, we will continue to offer access to a growing set of on-device API’s to enable best-in-class integration with core BlackBerry applications and features (which we call “Super App” experiences). We are also planning to provide a range of advanced cloud-based services including the BlackBerry Payment and Advertising Services, advanced location-based services, application analytics, and powerful Push services. Stay tuned for more details on these future release plans.

Final Thoughts

We believe we are the most committed of any mobile platform to providing both our customers and developers with uncompromised solutions, characterized by offering choice, open standards and tools, and the opportunities to build and enjoy deeply integrated Super App experiences to take advantage of all that the BlackBerry platform has to offer.

We will continue to share more information in the coming weeks so that BlackBerry developers and customers can make informed choices. And stay tuned for more partner announcements along with some exciting details that we will share at the BlackBerry World™ conference in early May.

- Jim Tobin, SVP of the Software, Services & Enterprise Markets business unit at RIM

Friday, April 1, 2011

BlackBerry WebWorks Webcast Series wrap-up

Sincere thanks to everyone who joined us for the “Developing using the BlackBerry® WebWorks™ SDK” Webcast series. The recordings for each session of the webinar are available to access online. If you haven’t already done so, please schedule some time to set aside and watch them at your own convenience.

During this series, attendees were presented with a variety of topics, code samples and best practices. The goals of each of these sessions were to provide developers with new information they can use to build great applications for the BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet, as well as enabling them to share the knowledge they learn within their own development communities. Here’s an overview of what each webcast covered:

Webcast Part 1 – Getting Started: Discover the purpose and capabilities of the BlackBerry WebWorks platform. Learn how to setup your development environment and build a “Hello World” application. Understand how to configure and deploy applications to a BlackBerry® Tablet OS virtual machine.

Webcast Part 2 – My First App: Learn how to add visual enhancements and application functionality to your BlackBerry Tablet OS applications using BlackBerry WebWorks. Discover how easy it can be to leverage existing assets in constructing your application. Become more confident and efficient at using the development tools.

Webcast Part 3 – BlackBerry PlayBook Tablet Integration: Understand what platform features and supported APIs exist that can be used to add functionality to your BlackBerry PlayBook tablet applications. Discover how to use the BlackBerry WebWorks JavaScript® APIs to integrate your application content with the underlying BlackBerry Tablet OS.

Webcast Part 4 – User Interface Guidelines and Best Practices: Learn how to design great BlackBerry PlayBook tablet applications that optimize the experience for your end users. Incorporate best practices and habits in your development processes to help reduce overall development and troubleshooting time of your BlackBerry WebWorks applications.

Start and Grow your Business with the BlackBerry Seminar Series

We’re entering the final stretch of our North American SmartBuilder Tour for small businesses and entrepreneurs. You can join us for a morning of interactive presentations, discussions and networking. Also, you’ll be able to enjoy a complimentary breakfast and listen to guest speakers share insights on BlackBerry® mobile solutions that will help make your business more efficient, responsive and productive.

Did we mention that registration is FREE? There will also be giveaways and attendees at each event can enter for a chance to win a new BlackBerry smartphone.* We’re excited to be bringing these three inspiring speakers to you: Ramon Ray, Brent Leary, and Patrick Schwerdtfeger.

Check out the Start and Grow your Business with the BlackBerry Seminar Series website and register your spot at the following cities:

Miami – April 5, 2011
Los Angeles – April 5, 2011
Atlanta – April 7, 2011
Washington – April 8, 2011
Orlando – April 12, 2011
Boston – April 13, 2011
Chicago – April 14, 2011
Denver – April 14, 2011
Houston – April 14, 2011
Las Vegas – April 15, 2011
Cincinnati – April 20, 2011

Hope to see you there!

BlackBerry Support Community Forums is Celebrating!

Today marks the 3rd birthday of the BlackBerry® Support Community Forums! While we started out solely as a support site, the Forums have successfully grown into the thriving, vibrant communities we see today.

It’s in honor of our birthday that we’d like to announce two awesome new initiatives: We’re getting a brand new look, and we’re launching the Forums in their own Spanish version at Foros de Soporte Comunitario BlackBerry. So not only are we adding some great new features and a cleaner, more modern look, we’re also adding whole new sites to accommodate our ongoing growth.