BlackBerry OS 7 Review: Improvement Through Refinement

“The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.” ~ Albert Einstein

I have had the chance to go full on with a BlackBerry Bold 9930 for the last few days and I have to say the thing that keeps coming up over and over again is the refinement. RIM did not make any drastic changes in BlackBerry 7 other than focus on speed. On the other hand you can see that they took some time to refine many of the features they added in OS 5.0 and 6.0. This refinement is something that has been lacking from RIM recently and I am really happy to see it coming back. I won’t focus on the speed and OpenGL graphics improvement in the review of OS 7 since that will come with the device reviews but I will focus on the improvements I have seen so far and let me know if I missed anything.

When I picked up my first BlackBerry the thing that amazed me the most was how fluid and thought out the communications process is. I have tried many other devices and every time this refinement is what brings me back. The example I always use is when you open an email and want to reply. You hit the menu button and the first highlighted option is reply. You type your reply and hit the menu button and now the default option is send. You see this type of fluid workflow at the core of the BlackBerry OS and now it is being refined and expanded in OS 7.0. Here are some of those refinements that I am enjoying:

Enhanced Gmail Features are now available in the main “Messages” application

This is something I have asked for RIM to add since they added the Enhanced Gmail Plugin. With OS 7.0 you can now star, archive, label, and “report spam” from the main messages application. You used to have to go into each email separately to get this feature but now it works in the main messages app which combines all your email. All I can say is THANK YOU to whomever implemented this.

You can now add contact information to an existing contact through the menu

This is another feature that I used to rely on 3rd party apps to fulfill. Say you had a contact but wanted to add another email address to it. Now you can through the menu!

BlackBerry ID is now integrated into the OS

We saw quite a bit from BlackBerry ID since App World introduced it but now it is part of the core OS. You no longer need to sign into your BlackBerry ID multiple times for apps like App World. It simply remembers you unless you want to purchase an app.

Full version of Documents To Go with Word, Excel, and PowerPoint Viewing, Editing, & Creating!

You used to have to pay at least $30 for the full version of Documents to Go. With BlackBerry 7 that is now free and works like a charm!

The browser is MUCH faster and now has Developer Tools built in!

The developer tools give BlackBerry developers a way to debug their BlackBerry browser apps and gives you the ability to easily view the source code of a page! No other mobile platform offers this! On top of that you can see that the new 1.2Ghz processors really speed up website loading and scrolling. Its a much more fluid browsing experience with a refined Torch Mobile browser.

HD Video Recording!

I am not sure if we should count this as an OS or hardware improvement but I love it!

You can now select your own Homescreen Panels

In BlackBerry OS 6 RIM introduced Homescreen Panels. Now with BlackBerry 7 you can select which panels you want.

Improved Media Options

In BlackBerry 7 you can now select if you want the volume control buttons to control your tracks in case you have thick thumbs like me. You also have improved slideshow transitions that did not exist before.

Grouping emails together gets its own menu option

With the processor bump in BlackBerry 7 you can now group emails by subject with serious speed. RIM has also added the ability to toggle the feature to the menu.

Backup your device or switch devices using your SD Memory Card!!!

This is a feature I have wanted RIM to add for years. You can now backup and restore all of your on device information to your SD card! Thank you RIM!

Universal Search gets improved with Voice Search

With the faster processor comes faster Universal Search. It is now no longer indexing every time you want to use it and it throws in a new feature allowing you to search using Voice to Text. It actually works really well and I am really hoping RIM improves it with Voice Control of the whole OS!

An easy way to view your storage use

 

I am not sure if this is new to OS 7.0 but I have never seen it before. I was on the homescreen icon for slacker and when I hit the menu button it let me select “view memory usage” which showed me the info shown above.

Improved texting app

 

RIM has improved the integration of the SMS conversation view. It now also only shows you how many characters you have left when you get under 15 which is less distracting. There have also been some other visual refinements.

Improved Social Feeds app

 

 

The Social Feeds app in OS 7.0 also got a nice bump. It now has more than the two panels and even lets you create your own panels. Favorites and Flagged Items also get their own panels along with Podcasts.

All in all I am loving these small updates in OS 7.0 and I really hope RIM has more in store. These are the small things that make BlackBerry my platform of choice. As I said before these are not huge improvements but rather small refinements. Other devices tend to just add headline worthy features but never integrate them or refine them. RIM is getting back to their roots by providing a more integrated and customizable experience.

Let me know if I missed anything!

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BlackBerry Bold 9900 lands in Indonesia

 

Expected to be available in late September for the price of 5,999,000 Indonesian rupiahs (approx. $700 USD), the BlackBerry Bold 9900 is slowly taking over the world, making its way to Indonesia next. RIM's Vice President for South Asia, Hastings Singh, commented:

"We are very excited to be bringing the highly-anticipated BlackBerry Bold 9900 smartphone to Indonesia. This powerful new smartphone offers a best-in-class mobile communications experience together with faster browsing, richer multimedia and improved overall performance."

Now that RIM is back on track with releasing innovative products, it was a good move to launch the BlackBerry Bold 9900 early on in Indonesia, as the home of Jakarta is no stranger to the BlackBerry world. With more than 3 million active BlackBerry users in the country, Indonesia has long been hailed as the BlackBerry nation. And with the launch of the Bold 9900 in the country, that nation will soon have the opportunity to experience a whole new world with BlackBerry 7. Full press release available here. 

Near Field Communication - what is it and why should I care?

The future that Near Field Communications (NFC) promises is nothing short of astounding. However, the obstacles lying in the path of that future are just as great. NFC is honestly nothing new; as a technology, NFC has been around since 2004. In 2005, Cingular (now AT&T) installed NFC point of sale readers as a test in Philips Arena in Atlanta. They were confident that by 2010, over half of the wireless phones in the US would support NFC. Today, there are but a handful.

It's only in the recent past that NFC became something of a hot topic. As to why, I can't help but think that it has something to do with money. Mobile payments will be the driving force behind NFC adoption in Europe and North America. The other uses of NFC - Bluetooth pairing, smartcards, file sharing - just aren't important enough to design into a smartphone for the masses. At best, the features would seem gimmicky; at worst, unnecessary.

But paying for food; clothing; and Wal-Mart with your phone may very well become a thing. A great deal of the hardware required to do this is already in place; it's all thanks to that little chip that might be in your credit card right now.

 

 

In many ways, NFC has its roots in Radio Frequency ID. In that technology, a passive sensor is bombarded with radio waves from a reader; it uses that energy to send back a plain-text string of numbers. RFID is used in a number of places like tracking pallets at Wally World (Wal-Mart to some) and tagging animals - both wild and domestic.

The next evolution of this radio frequency technology was the smartcard. Unlike RFID chips, information on smartcards is not sent in plain-text. They contain chips capable of both sending and storing information with a high level of encryption. Smartcards are used in high-security government and corporate applications, transit ticketing (like the Clipper card used at BART stations), and payments. That credit card that lets you do contactless payment at McDonald's? That's a smartcard.

Until NFC, these radio frequency solutions have consisted of passive sensors. A reader sends out a pulse of radio energy that the chip uses to send back a response. There is no power source in these chips, only a rather long antenna. NFC integrated into a smartphone brings the passive chip and the active reader into one package. More than that, the process becomes more dynamic and more secure.

 

 

Harkening back to its RFID ancestry, NFC allows you to read NFC tags. Oftentimes these tags are in the form of stickers that can be affixed to any number of items. Posters with the stickers could point you to a movie's website. Tagged items in stores could give more information about themselves. In short, NFC tags work similarly to QR codes, though there's no camera to worry about focusing "just right."

 

As mentioned before, smartcards can easily be emulated by the NFC technology found in a handful of Android devices, two BlackBerry devices, and a rumored iPhone device. The Bay Area Rapid Transit system uses the Clipper Card - a smartcard - to ticket and charge its customers for the ride. The cash balance to these cards can be added at kiosks located around the stations. With an NFC equipped smartphone and an intelligent app, users could add money right from their phone.

 

Pairing two Bluetooth devices is easier that it once was, but it's still slightly complicated. NFC offers near effortless pairing of devices. Simply tap a Bluetooth device to your phone and the two are paired.

 

 

This is the most important part about what an NFC-equipped smartphone can do. Not necessarily because it's the most powerful feature, but because it is money and commerce that will drive NFC to become more readily adopted. Without banks and merchants behind the technology, NFC will go no where.

Fortunately, a great deal of the hardware is already in place. Those contactless card readers you can sometimes find in stores today are certainly compatible with NFC systems. Smartcards - like that chipped credit card - are arguably more secure than a simple magnetic stripe, and I can see a future where mobile phone payments are even more secure than that. Logging in to an app or entering a PIN on-screen would be yet another way for banks and card issuers to verify who exactly is making this purchase.

And as much as I would like to believe otherwise, that image up there is a fake, a bit of Photoshop trickery. They're aren't any widespread NFC mobile payment options for BlackBerry... yet. 

 

We carry so many cards around with us. Some cards are used to purchase things. Other cards are used to gain access to secured areas. NFC aims to reduce that multitude of cards you carry down to zero. With all of those functions carried out by the NFC technology in a smartphone, all you need to carry with you is that device.

NFC, though more than a half-decade old, can still be considered an emerging technology. There's been precious little adoption in the mobile payments sector and thus very few phones actually support that functionality. But the times, they are a' changing.

With more mobile devices supporting the technology there will be more demand to make use of it. Increased demand will cause the technology to appear on more phones. Which will increase demand which.... You get the idea.

NFC and mobile payments go hand in hand. Where one succeeds, the other will soon follow. And with it, comes all the gimmicky, geeky goodies that NFC promises to bring.

 

Sources: Near Field Communication: A Quick Guide to the Future of Mobile, How will NFC get its piece of the $4 quadrillion payments pie?, RFID Tags and Contactless Smart Card Technology: Comparing and Contrasting Applications and Capabilities [PDF]

BlackBerry OS 7 Bakes "Add To Existing Contact" Feature into OS

 

One of the things I have always wanted RIM to add to the BlackBerry OS has finally been added! Until now you needed to install a third party app if you wanted to easily add an email address or phone number to an existing contact. Well fret no longer. One of our readers pointed out to us that their Rogers BlackBerry Bold 9900 has the ability to add information to an existing contact right in the OS. We confirmed this on a couple of other Rogers 9900s including one of our writers but do not have confirmation from other carrier devices yet so let us know.

Either way I am loving how RIM is taking some time to refine the core BlackBerry OS experience in OS 7. To add information to an existing contact you can hover over the contacts email address in the messages application or hover over the phone number in the phone app and hit the menu button and select "Add to Contacts." You will then get a popup asking you if you want to create a new contact or add it to an existing contact. I did not have the Rogers 9900 in front of me to field test it myself but so far it seems to be working!

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BlackBerry Management Center para BIS

¡¡Los que habéis administrado varias cuentas de BIS de una empresa lo vais a agradecer!! Hoy RIM anuncia BlackBerry Management Center que nos permite administrar centralizadamente varias cuentas de usuarios de BIS en una misma consola de administración. Y no solo nos permite su administración centralizada de cuentas de email, sino que también su coste es 0 €, y podemos administrar funcionalidades de BlackBerry Protect desde BlackBerry Management Center.

Sin duda alguna para aquellos de vosotros que estáis en BIS y con varios dispositivos BlackBerry en la empresa o en casa con varios dispositivos BlackBerry se va agradecer dicha administración conjunta y la seguridad que ello conllevará ya que al integrar BlackBerry Protect podremos bloquear remotamente el dispositivo, hacer un wipe del mismo  Ideal la solución para las Pymes que sin inversión alguna pueden tener funcionalidades de BES con BIS.

Por ahora no he sido capaz de acceder como administrador al BlackBerry Mangement Center así que si alguno de vosotros sabe como ya dirá que hay que hacer para activar y empezar a trabajar con la consola, aunque no se si dicho problema podría estar ocasionado que en casa tenemos BES con MDaemon. Este es el mensaje de error que me aparece me indica que he de recibir una invitación por email para poder validarme pero no he recibido nada:

El link para acceder a BlackBerry Management Center: http://www.blackberry.com/managementcenter

Actualización: Problema solventado primero había de crear la cuenta de administrador, tal y como indican en la página web desde https://managementcenter.blackberry.com/newAccount.do. Al hacerlo se recibe un email indicando lo que pude hacer el administrador:

El administrador principal puede:

Esta cuenta creada para BlackBerry Management Center va vinculada a una cuenta de BlackBerry ID, y una vez validos con nuestro BlackBerry ID ya podremos ir añadiendo usuarios a los que se les envía un email de invitación para que acepten el mismo y a partir de allí ya los podremos administrar centralizadamente.

El usuario que invitamos al recibir el email tendrá que aceptar las condiciones del servicio y rellenar unos cuantos datos de su dispositivo:

Recordad que en Opciones/Estado podréis encontrar PIN e IMEI del dispositivo. Y una vez hecho esto tendremos que teclear un código de confirmación para aceptar todo el proceso:

Y luego nos pedirá que permisos queremos otorgar al administrador de BlackBerry Management Center:

Y una vez hecho esto por el usuario o por el administrador antes de entregarle el dispositivo al usuario ya podremos administrar al mismo desde BlackBerry Management Console

RIM Releases Patch for Severe BES Vulnerability – Latest Version Safe

RIM released a patch for all of the recent versions of BlackBerry Enterprise server. Its good to note that this vulnerability effects most new versions of BES from v5.0.1 to v5.0.3 MR2 though it was fixed in BES v5.0.3 MR3 for both Exchange and Lotus Domino. This is a pretty serious vulnerability that can be exploited by users visiting a website with a malicious TIFF or PNG image file or even an email with such an image. The only workaround disables all images so the patch is really your only bet.

Check out more info at RIM’s Knowledge Base article on the issue

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BlackBerry Curve 9380 Caught on Camera & Video Again

 

More and more about the unannounced BlackBerry Curve 9380 is coming to light. This is the full touch version of the BlackBerry Curve and it looks hot. Now we have MacBerry.de following up with pictures and a nice video of the device. They also got some of the specs along with the video they captured below:

Desktop Video Link | Mobile Video Link

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