i-Mentalist releases Slotch - a FUZZengine enabled alarm clock for the BlackBerry PlayBook

Posted By Ray Nicolini
Via CrackBerry

Awhile back we told you about i-Mentalist's new personalizing tool called FUZZengine. It's a great app for downloading images, videos, and sounds for your BlackBerry PlayBook but it's real purpose, customizing and personalizing your native and third party applications, was not yet available. Well the wait is finally over! I-Mentalist let us know that they've just released their first FUZZengine compatible application called Slotch.

Slotch is more than just your basic alarm clock. By combining world time and weather with beautifully designed graphics and multi-alarm capabilities all in one package you get a simple, easy to navigate, and useful alarm clock application for your BlackBerry PlayBook. It allows you to view as many cities as you want so you'll always know what time it is around the world, see current and future weather conditions in any of your cities when you wake up, and backup and restore your settings using their cloud service, SkyParrot. For those of you who like easter eggs that are embedded in applications, I discovered that if you enter in an alarm without a name, random jokes appear on the screen in its place.

Features

• Current time and date
• Digital and analog clock
• Seconds counter on digital and analog clock
• 12 and 24 Hour time
• Override device display timeout
• Multi alarms with notes
• Post alarms on Social Networks
• Custom sounds for every alarm
• Override device volume
• Custom snooze time for each alarm settings
• Custom volume settings for each alarm
• 5 days weather forecast
• Unlimited number of cities in weather forecast
• Unlimited number of world clocks
• Unique User Interface
• Advanced gestures control
• Social Networks connection
• Dual view (Weather/Clock - World/Clock)
• Includes FUZZengine customizing features

Slotch works like a charm on my PlayBook and offers a clean graphical interface. I recommend doing a restart after installing if you experience any issues. As for the social networking integration it only lets your friends and followers see your alarms and if you're using the application. If you don't want to make that information public you can easily enable or disable this feature in options.

This application is currently available for the BlackBerry PlayBook for $2.99 in BlackBerry App World but coming soon to BlackBerry Smartphones running OS 5.0 and higher. As someone who can't wake up in the morning and uses more than one alarm clock to get out of bed, you can never have too many alarm clocks. While it may not have all the bells and whistles of other available alarm clock applications I do like the FUZZengine integration for changing my alarm sounds and images and how simple it is to swipe between the different cities.

More information / screenshots and to purchase Slotch

Research In Motion is dead, for now

Posted by Ray Nicolini

Via BGR.com

I saw from the inside and outside how RIM transformed the mobile landscape, and how the company even battled its own inner demons throughout the years. Here are my thoughts on the company’s worst quarter in five years:

RIM grew incredibly fast. It grew faster than the company knew how to manage, and RIM slowly — and then quickly — slipped as a result. This is the company that used to make users choose between a device with Wi-Fi and no GPS, or GPS and no Wi-Fi, just to have two products on the market instead of one. This is the company that refused to take the consumer market seriously for a number of years. This is the company that couldn’t see the future when it was right in front of them.

One of my high-level Research In Motion sources who I’ve known for a number of years wrote an open letter to the company a few months ago that I published on BGR. Looking back at it now, here are some of the most intriguing and timely quotes:

• Let’s obsess about what is best for the end user. We often make product decisions based on strategic alignment, partner requests or even legal advice — the end user doesn’t care.
• We need some heavy hitters at RIM when it comes to software management. Teams still aren’t talking together properly, no one is making or can make critical decisions, all the while everyone is working crazy hours and still far behind.
• The public’s questions about dual-CEOs are warranted. The partnership is not broken, but on the ground level, it is not efficient. Maybe we need our Eric Schmidt reign period.
• Just because someone may have been a loyal RIM employee for 7 years, it doesn’t mean they are the best Manager / Director / VP for that role. It’s time to change the culture to deliver or move on and get out.
• Strategy is often in the things you decide not to do.

What’s so interesting is that RIM has actually started to implement most of what the open letter said the company should do. The company isn’t releasing BlackBerry 10 until it’s happy with it, the end user has been more of a focus, the company has gotten rid of a number of executives, and the dual-CEO structure is gone. Unfortunately, it’s not enough. RIM has a fundamental problem with what the company can offer, and what the company can do best.

RIM CEO Thorsten Heins even stated yesterday during the company’s earnings call that RIM’s best-in-class enterprise integration, security and push email are no longer a huge selling point for the company. Really? It took five years to figure that out?

The enterprise loves the BlackBerry Bold 9900′s keyboard, but most BlackBerry customers want a full-touch smartphone and RIM’s all-touch smartphones are poor excuses for a phone. In fact, an iPhone 3GS or prepaid Android smartphone is a much better option for the majority of people in the market for a low or mid-range smartphone compared to a BlackBerry Torch. RIM’s average selling prices have taken a nosedive since the company’s products can’t compete on features, only price, though competitors like Huawei and others have seized this opportunity to introduce lower-priced Android smartphones.

Something I have been told from another senior source at Research In Motion is that the company is considering ditching their system access fees for all carriers. This amounts to more than $1 billion in revenue each quarter for RIM, but the company thinks it might be a way to drive BlackBerry 7 sales before BlackBerry 10 finally hits the market. It would be a radical move that could help the company sell more units in the short term, but would get them nowhere in the long term. In fact, all it would really do is buy the company time to try and get BlackBerry 10 out of the door, or buy time while it explores other options for the company’s future.

I spoke with the same inside source who wrote the open letter to RIM we published last summer, and here is what this person had to say: “RIM only has one hope. Ditch the QNX bullshit experiment that will be the exact definition of a 1.0 operating system — it can not compete.” The source went on to say, “Take on Windows Phone and negotiate with Microsoft. You need BBM on Windows Phone, get a royalty fee from all the others. Then build out the BES story with Exchange — beef that up, now there’s an interesting and unique value proposition.”

BGR exclusively reported in January that Research In Motion was pushing for a sale of a part (or entire) company to Samsung. Those talks were real. RIM has talked with a bunch of companies about licensing its software and OS, licensing BlackBerry Messenger, licensing the company’s network infrastructure, and even selling different parts of RIM flat out.

The RIM we know, is dead. The company has 12 to 15 months until it’s either acquired, or broken into pieces and sold for parts. I’m not even sure why the company still plans to launch BlackBerry 10 smartphones at this point.

BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0 Walkthrough With RIM’s Jeff Gadway

Posted By Ray Nicolini

by Ronen Halevy via BerryReview.com

I had a chance to sit down with Jeff Gadway, Senior Brand & Marketing Communications Manager @ RIM, this week to demo what is coming in PlayBook OS 2.0. Now that the launch is right around the corner it is nice to see where the software stands and how it works. You will all have this new OS update in your hands very soon (RIM cannot confirm a date) and try it for yourself but until then I will try to focus on what I saw in the latest build. First things first PlayBook OS 2.0 will be a ~400-500MB update based on if you are upgrading from the latest v1.0 or just turning on a new PlayBook you just purchased.

 

Gadway let us know that there are three main focus points of PlayBook OS 2.0. They are Communications, Productivity, and Connections. One of the main things added in PlayBook OS 2.0 is the communications portion but it ties in well with the rest of the OS bundling in functionality from many of RIM’s acquisitions including Gist and Tungle. The three main new apps in PlayBook OS 2.0 are the Unified Mailbox, Calendar, and Contacts application that are all native. It allows you to connect one of each of your Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn accounts and multiple email and exchange accounts. The most beautiful part is how RIM pulls it all together into one seemless mailbox. It allows you to both read your Facebook and Twitter messages and compose them from one place. You can multi-task by having multiple emails in your compose screen that you can flip between.

What I really was impressed with is that RIM seems to be focusing back on the basics that made BlackBerry great. I am talking about productivity. Gadway called it the BlackBerry Flow where RIM makes everything simpler. I simply compared BlackBerry Flow to the intuitiveness of how when you open an email on a BlackBerry smartphone the first option in the menu is reply. Once you click on that on the next screen the main option is send. In the PlayBook unified mailbox and the other applications this was clearly visible in how all the action buttons are on the right and left borders of the screen which is naturally where your hands sit. They also added quite a bit of HTML editing for email so you can bold, change fonts, colors, and other things when composing an email. Even cooler is the ability to edit email threads inline so you can respond inline! RIM also created nice connectivity between the apps which truly makes it feel like the PlayBook is getting the BlackBerry trademark productivity.

 

When it comes to the calendar app I was really impressed with what RIM did together with TAT and Tungle. The calendaring experience is very close to what you see in Outlook but with way more visual flair. For example, on the main month view screen you can see the days you are busier because the date gets bigger the more appointments you have. Also they have a little bar by each day that shows what time of day your appointments are based on a 24 hour bar. The day view lets you easily hold down an item and move it around along with inviting people to meetings and coordinating. It also has a cool view showing you who you are meeting with today. The most impressive view for me was the week view which showed you the whole week on one screen and then let you expand each day separately. The visual elements here are beautiful! Also worth noting is that if you pull down the menu bar it will show you your multiple calendars like Facebook, Gmail, Exchange, and even a local calendar and you can toggle on and off which ones you want to see.

Now this all ties back to the contacts app that is built dynamically for you from the accounts you registered to your PlayBook. It will pull in data for all your contacts and even reach out online to find more information. You will see which contacts are work contacts and then you can drill down even further with information it gets from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, articles about their company, their location, their latest updates… This is also integrated with the updated Video Chat app which gives you a presence identifier and automatically checks if a user has a PlayBook and tells you by showing a green icon by their name if they are online. You can click on any little detail in the contact and it will launch the respective app like a twitter account will launch Twitter (not an app) and a video chat ID will launch video chat. This all becomes even more useful when you are using the Video Chat app since it integrates your contact list directly into the app and automatically recognizes users. The interface also got a nice overhaul in 2.0.

Another huge update RIM has added in OS 2.0 is a new predictive keyboard. We have seen videos of this before hand but it really does simply predict what you are going to type next. You can write whole conversations just by typing the word “I” and then it will predict what you want to write next. This is impressive because it learns from your use so if you usually type I am coming home it will learn to predict that instead of the defaults. This is also an interesting new place for bridge to come in for users who like physical keyboards on their BlackBerry. You can now use your BlackBerry as both a physical keyboard and mouse for your PlayBook. That means you can use the touchscreen to move around the PlayBook screen and the keyboard on your smartphone to type on your PlayBook.

The Bridge feature in general got a bunch of new features. RIM showed off some of them like the new Open on PlayBook option by showing a picture you have on your phone on the PlayBook but this goes way further. Say for example you have an open email on your BlackBerry smartphone you can Open on to your PlayBook and it will open it up through the bridge. The same goes for things like PowerPoint attachments and Excel files. Pretty cool right? The one thing I was sort of hoping RIM had solved would be the potential for disconnect between your Smartphone and PlayBook. For example, if you read an email or change a calendar entry on your BlackBerry Smartphone it will not be able to reconcile that over the Bridge but would rely on Gmail or exchange to propagate that between the two devices.

Also worth noting are updated Documents to Go app along with other additions like a video store. App World has also been updated with a new look but it did not get the “Update All” button that I was hoping for. RIM has also updated the PlayBook OS with a Demo mode that cycles videos and tutorials so that when they are displayed at stores they will put their best foot forward. Any user can access this new mode. They are also putting out a new Discover Now 2.0 app that will help new PlayBook users discover OS 2.0 and its new features.

 

All in all I cannot wait to get PlayBook OS 2.0 on my device. This just gives us a taste of what RIM has in store for BlackBerry 10 and the phones running QNX. These apps also make the swipe left and right between apps gesture way more useful to switch between an email you are composing and your calendar. At launch there will not be a notes and tasks app but it looks like they are coming. RIM is also scheduled to release the PlayBook administration piece of BES/Fusion this quarter so hopefully that will add even more goodies.

        

I also asked Gadway if RIM is going to keep up on their promise for incremental updates instead of waiting for big splashes like they did with PlayBook OS 2.0. He explained that RIM did it this time since the different native apps needed to be interconnected first and could not be released separately. In the future RIM plans on being somewhere between the Apple approach of OS updates once a year and others that are fragmented with OS releases constantly.

I can’t wait to get to play with this for a few days on the final build once it is officially released!

Why Blackberry Will Make a Comeback

Posted By Ray Nicolini

The night is always darkest before the dawn.  For Research in Motion, the former heavyweight champion of the smart phone world, it sure seems like it has reached a record darkness.  It has been caught flat footed when the iPhone started emerging as a contender, completely blindsided by Androids, and is taking some serious heat about its ability to perform as its usual reliable self.  Is this the case of an aging iconic figure incapable of mounting a comeback?

Media will have you believe the smart phone war is a two horse race with iOS and Android in the middle of a fight for dominance over the market.  Does this mean Blackberry is no longer in the picture? ... Well, not exactly.  CNET has reported Android having 43.7% of market share during the 3 month period ending August, 2011.  By comparison, Apple has 27.3% and Blackberry is at 19.7%.  However, Blackberry is the only OS of these 3 to have dropped in popularity having 24.7% market share in previous months.  Keep in mind that this market has increased 10% and TechCrunch has reported that the Smartphone market now accounts for 28% of the total phone market.

These numbers aren’t complementary to Blackberry, in fact, it’s quite the opposite.  With the release of the iPhone 4Gs timed exactly at the same time as the RIM servers shutting down things couldn’t possibly look worse for RIM.  However, where some see despair I see opportunity.  Why is it that I still believe in Blackberry and remain loyal?

The End is not Inevitable

Nintendo was in exactly the same situation RIM finds itself now. However, they managed to reinvent themselves by leveraging there already popular features (namely iconic games and characters) and creating a very unique experience never before experienced on previous systems yet still holding true to their roots.

Something about RIM’s script reads awfully similar to Nintendo’s.  RIM with the new QNX OS which will be in the next line of phones has an opportunity to completely reinvent itself and keep on leveraging their ever popular BBM and native email services.  Additionally, RIM has one ace up its sleeve that I believe has flown under the radar.  About a year ago, RIM acquired TAT, an expert User Interface Company.  While the latest round of BlackBerry 7 devices has a slightly better UI, I am not convinced it is incorporating TAT technology just yet.  Will we see the marriage of a new OS and an overhauled interface?  Possibly, and if this is the case prepare for a kickass experience.

Previous Customer Relationships

A big reason I believe Nintendo was able to come back with such authority is the fact that so many people are familiar with the product, and want to see it succeed.  RIM having been an innovator and leader in the section for such a long time will surely have a base of people that long for Blackberry experience that used to feel so great.

Of course, this experience has recently become sour with the latest server issue.  However, RIM has reacted fast and managed to present the impression that they will try harder and work better.  Although some find it to be the last straw, I believe they have a lot more fight in them.  I think that RIM should take a page out of Dominoes Pizza Marketing strategy when they created a new campaign surrounding their new recipe.  They admitted their mistakes, and emphasized they had changed.  If RIM employs this strategy and admits they have been lacking in the past, they should be able to recapture the hearts of many.

Great Competitive Advantage

Just because blackberry is falling behind, this does not make it a bad device.  In fact, there are really great aspects that competitors have yet to beat or match.  As you have been preached to time and time again, BB security is the gold standard.  The BB playbook is the only tablet to be certified for government use in the US; not to mention the President of the US also uses a Blackberry. 

BBM is now being rivalled by imessenger but there is no denying the BBM brand is still the most dominant mobile instant messenger.  It has been in our hearts for so long and withstood the test of time.  RIM is additionally making this ace up their sleeve even better by developing new innovation such as BBM music.

The form factor of a Bold, specifically the bold touch 9900/9930, is simply a thing of beauty.  If you need something with a bigger screen and still hold a keyboard they can offer a torch 9810 (slider).  If you really wish to have the big screen there is the torch 9850/9860 (touch); and if you want something a little smaller the curve 9360 should suffice.  It is a diverse set of phones that has a unified OS.  iPhones cannot say they have all these form factors, and Android has some real segmentation issues with their OS.

The lesser known advantage a blackberry has over Android or iOS is the efficiency of their data.  One can do twice the browsing and social media communication with a Blackberry compared to other devices and 4 times the email.  With the ever increasing need for data these days, this is actually quite a vital attribute to BB’s portfolio.

Blackberry is Canadian

Let me start by saying I mean no offence or wish to belittle any other nation. However, this is a Canadian Tech website, so I will proudly say that Blackberry is a Canadian product.  It is the very first Canadian mobile phone manufacturer and obviously the best Canadian mobile phone manufacturer.  BB phones are filled with diversity just like our country is.  Canadians have a certain attitude that allows us to take hits march forward and overcome. I believe this legend of a tech company, that has infiltrated the hearts of many worldwide over the years, is the same.  It may have been bruised, cut, and knocked down but it has not been knocked out.

People are already giving RIM the ten count but I believe it will get back up and be great once more.

Via TechVibes.com

E! News Now for BlackBerry PlayBook. Entertainment News, Gossip and More

Posted By Ray Nicolini

Those that like keeping up with the latest gossip and news in the world of entertainment, E! Entertainment Television Inc. has released E! News Now for the PlayBook as a free application. The application navigates very nice and I actually like the news ticker scrolling along the bottom.

Get the latest entertainment news, gossip and more with the free E! News Now Playbook App! It’s never been easier to access the breaking entertainment news and videos you can’t live without. E! News Now delivers over a dozen video reports daily, bringing you the latest scoop on your favorite celebs. Only have a second? Check out the breaking news ticker at the bottom of the screen. Whether it’s the hottest scandal, biggest meltdown, or just the must-see moment everyone is talking about, E! News Now is on the case, delivering it to your BlackBerry Playbook 24/7.

Price Free

Available in BlackBerry App World Here.

via www.playbookdaily.com