Blackberry News & Articles

Word on the street is the humble app, which turned the cell phone into an all-purpose Super Smart Phone device, is getting close to the 1 million milestone. That includes everything from mobile games like Angry Bird and Civilization to retail banking links like Chase and Bank of America, to full-blown enterprise apps.  Mobile analytics firm Mobilewala said Apple, Android, BlackBerry and Windows Mobile 7 combined have collectively hit almost 992,000 and are due to hit the 1 million mark sometime next week. And the growth is just getting started -- the group said that number more than doubled this year with only 484,000 apps developed by the end of 2010.

Start-up The Social Radio is offering an Android app (with iOS and BlackBerry to follow) that reads out your choice of tweet streams between your own music to make it easier to follow what's going on when you can't read them directly. 

Android and iOS are undoubtedly today's most popular smartphone and tablet platforms. Not wanting to be left behind in the game, RIM -- creators of BlackBerry devices and enterprise server systems -- is introducing Mobile Fusion, which can help IT departments manage their mobile deployments, regardless of platform.

If you had little doubt what the most sought-after gadget was over the Thanksgiving break, the stats shows that tablets were the hottest ticket in town. Both online and in-store sales were through the roof as people seem hooked on tablets.

Smartphones and tablets are now a mainstay in the enterprise setting, and yet most carriers are moving toward capped bandwidth plans rather than unlimited schemes. With media-rich websites resulting in soaring data costs, a business' or user's best bet is to minimize data consumption through compression. The Opera Mini 6.5 release promises to save up to 90% of bandwidth.

Research-in-Motion, developer of the BlackBerry smartphone and tablet platform, has provided updates to its development of the next-generation PlayBook tablet operating system. It seems the much-awaited native support for BlackBerry Messaging has been left out in this update.

To try to make up for last week's email/web and messenger outage, RIM is offering consumers a range of utility software or games by way of apology.

Ever have a really great customer experience you wanted to share with management, at, say, a leading hotel chain? Conversely, ever needed to get something off your chest, only to find there was no real feedback loop in place?  Medallia Inc. has built its business on making that scenario go away. The Palo Alto-based customer experience management firm announced today its cross-platform Mobile Feedback Solution, giving customers an no-app approach to provide feedback on the most popular mobile devices. 

Will fast growing smartphone penetration make it easier to integrate and implement services and applications across all relevant mobile and connected devices? Good question. It’s one that Netbiscuits set out to answer in their Mobile Web Metrics Report.  

Last week was a busy one for conferences, but it was also a busy week for document management. BlackBerry users will be able to have access to Office 365 documents in beta, Colligo offers document management for SharePoint, eFileCabinet heads to the cloud, LibreOffice celebrates its first birthday and Version One partners with Intuitive.

RIM's woes continue in Europe with users reporting a second outage in two days as the company struggles to recover from yesterday's major disruption and BlackBerry users flood Twitter with complaints, again.

It’s the final day of the SharePoint conference in Anaheim, and there are just a few loose ends to tie up before leaving. While there has been a lot to think about over the past four days, there were a few releases that slipped under the radar from EntropySoft, RIM and CommVault, as well as early results of some interesting research from Forrester.

On the second day of the Liferay West Coast Symposium, held in Anaheim, Calif., hundreds of attendees had a busy day, from dozens of sessions focused on strategy and implementation with the open-source enterprise portal.

After HP's tablet firesale, and decision to sell off its PC unit, what will RIM do after announcing feeble sales of its PlayBook device during its latest quarterly figures, and will it fall to shareholder pressure to sell?