See that Storm-esque device there? You may have noticed that the home screen looks positively nothing like the experience you’re used to — and that’s because it’s not. Shown off as part of a slide deck in RIM’s “Super Apps” webinar for developers last week, the company’s official explanation is that this is a pure, off-the-cuff mockup, not indicative of anything they’re working on for future devices or releases of BlackBerry OS. To be fair, when you take the shot in context with the bullet points Read the rest of this entry »

We kid, we kid. There are many excellent reasons to choose a BlackBerry as your main handset in the year 2010, but we’ve got a brand new item to add to the list: bullet stoppage. A woman in Ohio was sitting with her gun-handling boyfriend at a restaurant when the gun went off and hit her leg. Lucky for the both of them, the BlackBerry in her pocket intercepted the bullet — rather sufficiently, though to the considerable demise of the handset. It seems as if it was helped along by a Read the rest of this entry »

Thought WiFi spectrum was congested now? You ain’t seen nothin’ yet, because SIM card provider Sagem Orga has hooked up with Telefonica to develop a marvel of modern technology called “SIMFi” that combines — you guessed it — WiFi with a run-of-the-mill SIM card like you’d slip in your cell. In practical terms, this means that you’re able to turn virtually any phone (or “classic handsets,” as the company calls them) into a WiFi hotspot accessible by authenticated laptops, MIDs, and Read the rest of this entry »

We’d figured that RIM’s ambitious (if not questionable) project to port the juiciest morsels of BlackBerry OS to a virtual machine running atop Windows Mobile was abandoned long ago, and for all we know, it has — but the half-baked remnants Read the rest of this entry »

A quick note for all of the good folks in India today (errr… well, yesterday technically). Looks like RIM has officially launched the BlackBerry Bold 9700 in India. Woohoo! The 9700 is now available nationwide in retail stores serviced by Redington India… Plus, it is now on hand at Airtel, Aircel, BSNL, Idea Cellular, Loop Mobile, MTNL, Reliance, Tata and Vodafone locations.

For users of the ever popular Bold 9000 in the region, the 9700 may draw more than a few looks. The design has been updated, and packs the touch-sensitive trackpad, a high-performance 624MHZ processor, 256MB of on-board flash memory, Read the rest of this entry »

Well, we’ve been seeing the BlackBerry Essex out in the wild for quite a while now, but this is the first time we’ve seen it with some Sprint branding, which we’re sure is enough to get at least some folks plenty excited (or regretful as the case may be). As most BlackBerry fans are no doubt well aware, the Essex is a Tour refresh that, among other things, adds some much needed WiFi capabilities to the phone, and ditches the Tour’s trackball in favor of a trackpad. Of course, this still isn’t a done Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s not mince words: any way you slice it, RIM’s built-in browser for BlackBerry renders sites about as well as your $199 netbook renders Avatar. The good news is that we’ve got every reason to believethe company recognizes the problem and is working to solve it — but on a completely unrelated front, they’re trying to speed up the process of fetching raw data off the interwebs, too. In a patent app made public this month, RIM’s lab geeks describe setting up a proxy server right on the phone Read the rest of this entry »

Okay, before we get too far here, keep your excitement in check: you’ll apparently never be able to buy this. The good news, though, is that CrackBerry seems to have it on authority that the phone you’re looking at here — an early Magnum prototype — has been scrapped in favor of something better, the “Dakota,” possibly a stealthy tribute to diehard BlackBerry user Dakota Fanning. In all seriousness, though, both devices are centered around the concept that you’d have a touchscreen up top, a Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been a hell of a year for Motorola, but one thing’s stayed the same: the company still thinks RIM is ripping off some of its patents. At least that’s the sense we’re getting from a new complaint Moto’s just filed with the International Trade Commission alleging the BlackBerry crew is infringing five patents on “early-stage innovations” that range across WiFi, app management, UI, and power management. As per usual with ITC complaints, Motorola’s asking for a ban on RIM Read the rest of this entry »

With rising concerns for privacy these days, advertisers are having an increasingly difficult time gathering personal consumer data. MobileRL, an Israeli start-up, is looking to change or “revolutionize” the way information is collected for ad purposes. The Israeli company wants you to download software onto your phone which will allow them to turn it into an eavesdropping device. Your phone’s microphone can be turned on at any time, at MobileRL’s discretion, so it can listen to what’s going on at any given time. This new “data collection tool” is obviously going to need user consent since you have to download it yourself, so that might mitigate most legal issues (unless you live in a place where they can force something Read the rest of this entry »