While there have already been reports about replacement Samsung Galaxy Note7 units overheating in South Korea, a new Wall Street Journal report now says that similar complaints have been received by the company in the US as well.
Image Credit: GSM Arena
In many cases, users have complained that the phablet gets very hot during calls. For its part, Samsung has acknowledged the complaints and has said that it's investigating the matter. The company is, however, assuring users that the issue "does not pose a safety concern.”
"There have been a few reports about the battery charging levels and we would like to reassure everyone that the issue does not pose a safety concern," the tech giant said. "In normal conditions, all smartphones may experience temperature fluctuations."
The South Korean firm also said that it's focusing on each case separately and trying to get it resolved through its customer service and warranty process.
The former smartphone giant, BlackBerry has announced that the company will not be manufacturing its own smartphone in house after 14years.
The once smartphone market leader has struggled to keep pace with modern handsets produced by rivals such as Apple and Samsung.
In May, the company's chief executive, John Chen, said he would know by September whether the hardware business was likely to become profitable.
Now, Blackberry says it will outsource hardware development to partners and focus more on software development.
BlackBerry also launched the "Software is the New BlackBerry" campaign.
The company has not yet confirmed when any further Blackberry phones will be released, but Mr Chen said on Wednesday that further devices including one with the "iconic" physical keyboard would go on sale.
"I always wanted to make sure that we keep having the iconic devices," Mr Chen told BNN.
"I just need to find a way to be efficient and be able to make money. I think we found the model."
The company said it sold about 400,000 smartphones in its second quarter - fewer than the previous three months.
"Blackberry can't keep producing its own phones indefinitely just to serve a small subset of its clients addicted to its home-grown devices," said Ben Wood of the CCS Insight consultancy.
"Blackberry had made no secret of the fact that it might shut down its own phone-making business. Pushing it out to a third party is a sensible solution - but any manufacturer making Blackberry branded devices will ultimately face the same challenges."
The world's biggest technology companies are joining forces to consider the future of artificial intelligence.
Amazon, Google's DeepMind, Facebook, IBM and Microsoft will work together on issues such as privacy, safety and the collaboration between people and AI.
Dubbed the Partnership on Artificial Intelligence, it will include external experts.
One said he hoped the group would address "legitimate concerns".
"We've seen a very fast development in AI over a very short period of time," said Prof Yoshua Bengio, from the University of Montreal.
"The field brings exciting opportunities for companies and public organisations. And yet, it raises legitimate questions about the way these developments will be conducted."
Bringing the key players together would be the "best way to ensure we all share the same values and overall objectives to serve the common good", he added.
One notable absentee from the consortium is Apple. It has been in discussions with the group and may join the partnership "soon", according to one member.
The group will have an equal share of corporate and non-corporate members and is in discussions with organisations such as the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence and the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence.
It stressed that it had no plans to "lobby government or other policy-making bodies".
"AI has tremendous potential to improve many aspects of life, ranging from healthcare, education and manufacturing to home automation and transport and the founding members... hope to maximise this potential and ensure it benefits as many people as possible," it said.
It will conduct research under an open licence in the following areas:
ethics, fairness and inclusivity
transparency
privacy and interoperability (how AI works with people)
trustworthiness, reliability and robustness
Microsoft's managing director of research hailed the partnership as a "historic collaboration on AI and its influences on people and society", while IBM's ethics researcher Francesca Rossi said it would provide "a vital voice in the advancement of the defining technology of this century".
Image copyrightThinkstockImage caption DeepMind uses data analysis of a million eye scans to find out more about problems such as macular degeneration
Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of Google's artificial intelligence division, DeepMind, said he hoped the group would be able to "break down barriers for AI teams to share best practice and research ways to maximise societal benefits and tackle ethical concerns".
And Amazon's director of machine learning, Ralf Herbrich, said the time was ripe for such a collaboration.
"We're in a golden age of machine learning and AI," he said.
"As a scientific community, we are still a long way from being able to do things the way humans do things, but we're solving unbelievably complex problems every day and making incredibly rapid progress."
Artificial intelligence is beginning to find roles in the real world - from the basic AI used in smartphone voice assistants and web chatbots to AI agents that can take on data analysis to significant breakthroughs such as DeepMind's victory over champion Go player Lee Sedol.
The win - in one of the world's most complex board games - was hailed as a defining moment for AI, with experts saying it had come a decade earlier than anyone had predicted.
DeepMind now has 250 scientists at its King's Cross headquarters, working on a variety of projects, including several tie-ins with the NHS to analyse medical records.
In a lecture at the Royal Academy of Engineering, founder Dr Demis Hassabis revealed the team was now working on creating an artificial hippocampus, an area of the brain regarded by neuroscientists as responsible for emotion, creativity, memory and other human attributes.
But as AI has developed, so have concerns about where the technology is heading.
One of the most vocal and high-profile naysayers is Tesla's chief executive, Elon Musk, who has tweeted the technology is "potentially more dangerous than nukes [nuclear weapons]" and expressed concerns humans were "just the biological boot loader for digital super-intelligence".
Last year, Mr Musk set up his own non-profit AI group, OpenAI.
It is not, at this stage, part of the Partnership on AI.
Designer says Sex With Glass will enable users to 'see what their partner sees' when making love
GOOGLE GLASS is already the ultimate fashion accessory for geeks, and now the internet-enabled eyewear could become a hit in the bedroom as well.
A new app called Sex With Glass is promising to steam up the spectacles of Glass wearers worldwide, as it allows wearers to see what their partner sees when they're making love.
Sherif Maktabi, the founder of the project, says when he began work on the erotic app he wanted to discover "how can we make sex more awesome with Google Glass". According to a report in the Business Insider his answer is through "shared live streaming, ephemeral video recording and voice controls for your connected home".
Maktabi, a design student at London's Central Saint Martins, has only spent one day with Google Glass at a hackathon held in November 2013, but he was so inspired he's spent his time since then developing Sex With Glass.
"Some people find what we do repulsive," admits Maktabi. "But a lot of other people - and I am basing this from the emails we are getting online - really desire to try this. People have fantasies, desires and needs. It's personal."
Maktabi says live streaming will make sex more steamy enabling wearers to "see what your partner can see... just say 'OK glass, it's time' and Glass will stream what you see to each other. And if you feel like stopping everything, just ask: 'OK glass, pull out'."
But will it catch on?
"What they do with that is up to them," says Maktabi. "Guilt, dogma and shame is something we still widely experience when it comes to sex and how we talk about it."
As well as enabling wearers to share each other's pleasure, the app can control bedroom lights and music if the user's home is wired up correctly. And if any further encouragement were needed the whole experience can be videoed - although the videos are deleted automatically after five hours. ·
It's still pretty early to be talking about the next generation of Apple iPhone, but the latest report from a Chinese website suggests that the iPhone 5s successor will support an enhanced camera and improved filters over the current model.
Citing the supply chain sources, the report claims that the upcoming iPhone will feature a 10 megapixel rear camera with an aperture of f/1.8. Furthermore, the new camera is said to be accompanied with new and improved filters, which is lighter and thinner than previously used IR filters.
The lighter filters will help capture quality images as it minimizes the color shift of CMOS sensors. The rumored brighter f/1.8 aperture will boost low-light performance and it allow you to do images with shallow depth of field and blur the background while keeping sharp focus on the closer subjects. Apple is also working on a new image stabilization mechanism, according to a recent patent filling. It looks like the company is working very hard to regain some of ground it lost in the camera department with the next iPhone.
Rumors of the Samsung Galaxy S5 specifications are slowly starting to converge – it was about time too, considering it's likely the new flagship will be unveiled at the upcoming MWC. The screen size will undergo another bump, this time to 5.24", and the resolution will follow – the new Super AMOLED screen will reportedly have QHD resolution (2,560 x 1,600 pixels). The pixel density will jump to 560ppi but the effects on visual quality are hard to predict (it depends on the matrix, really).
The chipset will continue Samsung's current approach of having a Snapdragon version (805 in this case) and an Exynos version (Exynos 6, but the core configuration is unknown). Both versions will have 3GB RAM say the rumors. Anyway, the camera should be a 16MP shooter with a leaked sample photo to back up those claims. The front-facing camera will allegedly have 3.2MP resolution. There's nothing on video capture, but we'd be surprised if the Galaxy S5 doesn’t do UHD video like the Note 3.
The storage options will be 32GB and 64GB, with the 16GB option conspicuously missing. It's high time the built-in storage caught up with the rest of the advancements. Finally, the battery capacity is said to be 3,200mAh, which sounds quite probable considering the LG G2 (a 5.2" phone) has a 3,000mAh juice pack.
None of these predictions sound particularly outlandish, but it's still too early to take them for granted. We haven’t heard anything on the metal and plastic versions rumor recently, but with a Galaxy S4 Black Edition out, a faux leather back seems like a safe bet. Source Via
Could there be a way to convert all those countless hours we spend on games into something useful in real-life, something big, as big as curing cancer?
As implausible as it sounds, turns out, the answer is yes. 'Play to Cure: Genes In Space' is an intergalactic game by Cancer Research UK that uses real-world cancer data that you solve in a virtual world to help scientist cure breast cancer.
A free Android and iOS space travel game, under the surface, Genes in Space uses real genetic data to create your quests, and playing the game speeds up the process of finding faulty genes, responsible for breast cancer. You can even play from the comfort of your couch to solve one of the world's most frightening diseases.
What’s the game all about? Genes in Space revolves around the mysterious ‘Element Alpha’ in space. You take over a spaceship to collect as much as possible of it. At the beginning of each level you have to pick the route through most Element Alpha (the most dense area). That route actually translates into real genetic data, and if thousands of gamers join in to manually map it, the speed of cancer research would improve hugely.
Real-world microarray genetic data...
..gets translated into a game map - just draw a track through the most dense areas to play.
The idea came about after a 2013 hackathon that brought scientists, game devs and designers together from all walks in life, including Google and Facebook employees. Now, with this game, game developers Guerilla Tea collaborated with scientists to have the real anonymous genetic data coming from thousands of breast tumors transformed into a space adventure game.
Cancer Research UK’s first game (not on mobile) already had 200 000 people classifying over 2 million cancer images, an effort that’s reduced the time for research from 18 months to just three. Why not play from the comfort of your Android and iOS device now for such a great cause?
Analysts say new iPhone is likely to feature Sapphire Glass screen embedded with solar cells
A SOLAR-POWERED iPhone 6 is likely to be one of the "tricks" Apple chief Tim Cook has up his sleeve, analysts say.
The California-based company released its "best quarter of iPhone and iPad sales to date" yesterday, says The Register, with revenue of $57.6bn and a quarterly net profit of $13.1bn. But its share price dipped reportedly because its conservative sales projections for the opening three months of 2014 have investors worried about a lack of growth.
Apple's revenue outlook for the quarter to March 2014 is between $42bn and $44bn. During the same quarter last year, Apple posted revenues of $43.6bn. What's needed to ensure continued growth over the longer term, says The Register, is a Next Big Thing. That may be the much-discussed Apple television or iWatch, but it could also be a radically-updated iPhone. ZDNet agrees, saying "solar energy may be what Apple needs to put the 'i' back into innovation." Apple filed a patent in February 2013 which included the use of touch sensors and solar panel, but the application didn't mention how the device might work. Since then, its partnership with mineral crystal specialist GT Advanced Technologies, has triggered speculation that the iPhone 6's Sapphire Glass screen "will be embedded with solar cells", ZDNet says. ZDNet's conclusion: "Apple is quite likely to use sapphire and solar charging in its devices in future, and one can expect the next iPhone or iWatch to come with the same in or around September-October 2014."
Suddenly, everything clicks, swipes and scrolls...
It began with iPhone. Then came iPod touch. Then MacBook Pro. Intuitive, smart, dynamic. Multi-Touch technology introduced a remarkably better way to interact with your portable devices — all using gestures. Now we’ve reached another milestone by bringing gestures to the desktop with a mouse that’s unlike anything ever before. It's called Magic Mouse. It's the world's first Multi-Touch mouse. And while it comes standard with every new iMac, you can also add it to any Mac with Bluetooth wireless technology for a Multi-Touch makeover.
Make one great gesture after another.
Multi-Touch technology on the iPhone and iPod touch introduced a breakthrough way to interact with your content. Magic Mouse, with its Multi-Touch surface, does the same thing for your Mac. When you use gestures, it’s as if you’re touching what’s on your screen. For instance, swiping through web pages in Safari gives you the feeling of flicking through pages in a magazine. And scrolling with Magic Mouse isn’t your everyday scrolling. It supports momentum scrolling (similar to iPhone and iPod touch), where the scrolling speed is dictated by how fast or slowly you perform the gesture.
Give it your personal touch...
Maybe you want scrolling but don’t want swiping. Or two-button clicking instead of one. Whatever the case, Magic Mouse works the way you want it to work. All you do is go to the Magic Mouse preference pane in System Preferences to enable or disable features. The ambidextrous design of Magic Mouse means it fits comfortably in your right hand if you’re a righty or in your left hand if you’re a lefty. And left-handers can easily swap left and right button functionality using System Preferences.
Now included with every new iMac. And available on its own for just $69. Would you be getting one soon???
The latest edition to the Galaxy family is the Samsung Galaxy Ace GT- S5830, which packs quite a punch considering its middle-of-the-road specification and £199.99 prepay/£25 contract price point.
The Android 2.2 (Froyo) operating system helps this smartphone stand tall next to other mid-range touchscreen devices, such as HTC's Wildfire, which comes with a noticeably slower processor and older version of Android, 2.1 (Eclair).
The Samsung Galaxy Ace is the little brother to the powerful Samsung Galaxy S in many ways.
Aesthetically, you'll be forced to play spot the difference if you put it up against the iPhone 4, and will come to the conclusion that the Samsung is generally smaller, lighter and nicer in the hand than the iPhone.
However, in terms of sex appeal, the iPhone 4 wins hands down for its sleek look and feel, since the Samsung Galaxy Ace is a bit too plasticky. Interestingly, although the Galaxy Ace is smaller, the screen size is exactly the same as the iPhone 4, at 3.5 inches.
The screen quality is a low-end TFT, and is poor compared to the Super AMOLED screen on the Samsung Galaxy S, which allows for crystal clear video playback.
There's no HD video recording, but the five-megapixel camera works well as a happy snapper – it has several shot and scene modes, which can be fun to play around with.
Upon first touch, the Nokia C5-03 is sleek but not stunning, chunky but light enough, and rocks minimalistic buttons, touchscreen capability and a shiny derriere.
But if you were picking up this smartphone in the hope that it might provide some real competition in the mid-range budget area, you may be in for a little disappointment. The Samsung Monte offers a better range of pre-loaded apps. The HTC Wildfire has a better UI and LED flash for the camera, and the mid-range Blackberry Curve 3G has email pretty much covered.
So what exactly is the Nokia C5-03 offering other than an extra '-03' on top of last year's Nokia C5?
Measuring in at just under 14mm, the handset is a little bigger than Nokia users might expect, but handily compact for everyone else.
Its rounded edges fit nicely in the hands, especially small ones, and while the depth might be an issue for some, we felt it gave the light handset (93g, thank you!) a little solidity and stopped the plastic-cased phone from feeling too cheap.
That said, it didn't prevent a hairy moment when removing the battery cover for the first time – the thin piece feels imminently snappable, which makes for a scary experience if you're, shall we say, as ham-fisted as we are.
The contrasting coloured end is a nice aesthetic addition, but is ultimately useless, though it allows for users to do a little outfit matching, if that's your thing. The loudspeakers are located there, though, which are perfectly loud and emit a nice, clear sound.
On the shiny back sits the five-megapixel camera, which is an improvement over its predecessor. There's no front-facing camera, so video calling is out.
All sockets, ports and buttons are present and correct. There's a charger socket, mini-USB socket (also for charging if necessary), 3.5mm audio jack, volume rockers, keypad lock button and place to put that lovely From Me To You Bear wrist strap you've been hoarding since the 90s.
There's also a microSD memory card port for up to an extra 16GB of storage to hold your morning commute podcasts, which are easily grabbable from both your computer hard drive and the Ovi podcast store. But should you get bored of those, a built-in accelerometer enables gameplay of modern classics such as Doodle Jump. Hours of fun right there.
Last year, we saw the INQ Chat 3G and INQ Mini 3G, promising Facebook integration on a budget - but sadly, thanks to quite poor processing, neither really stepped up to the task.
Fast forward to 2011, and the company has come back with the INQ Cloud Touch an Android-powered smartphone that keeps the budget tag, and shoves not only Facebook, but Spotify too deeper into the phone than anything on the market - and TechRadar has nabbed the first model to bring you our exclusive UK INQ Cloud Touch review.
Our colleagues at T3.com grabbed some INQ Cloud Touch video footage which you can watch below.
The 'budget' tag is one that many phone brands have struggled with in the past, as it's too easy to skimp on features or design in order to bring the handsets in at the correct price point. The Orange San Francisco is the only success we've really seen, with a high-res screen and slick OS all for £90.
The INQ Cloud Touch costs £199.95 on PAYG or just £18 on contract, so while it's not in the same category price wise, it's still very much cheaper than the £500+ price mark of the likes of the iPhone 4 and Samsung Galaxy S2.
The INQ Cloud Touch is a cute little handset, there's no doubt about that. Covered in a rounded plastic chassis that comes in red and white, the phone feels a little light in the hand, but nothing too bad. The design ethos is clearly cheerful and chirpy, and the smooth edges and large front icons certainly help facilitate that.
The front of the phone houses three touch-sensitive buttons (Menu, Home and Back), although there's no front-facing camera to speak of. But it's on the sides that INQ has decided to place its innovative keys, and we're big fans.
On the top left-hand side, a flush key sits with a small 'i' icon on - this is the info key that delivers pertinent information when pressed from any point in the phone. It's a nice touch, and easy to use no matter how you're holding the phone; plus it has a smooth pressing action.
The top of the INQ Cloud Touch has the microUSB slot (uncovered), 3.5mm headphone jack and power/lock key. We always like to see a cap for our charger slot (after the horrific breakfast jam tragedy of 2009) and the power button is a little hard to hit as it's part of the curved chassis. It's not terrible, but it does feel a little small.
The volume rocker switch is on the top right-hand side of the phone, and is easy to operate, although as it's flush it can be hard to hit in the pocket. Below it lives the media key, which is another nifty bit of innovation.
Pressing it will open up the Spotify player, giving you easy access to your music or the full Spotify experience (depending on whether you're a Premium user or not). The INQ Cloud Touch is the first phone to bring an offline Spotify experience (ie you don't need to pay £9.99 a month to use the app), and it's good to see access is hardwired to the phone.
The rear of the Cloud Touch looks similarly cutesy - the camera sensor has a plastic ring around it to look oversized, next to a speaker grille with the same dimensions to offer an experience that looks ever so slightly like a face. Weird, but kind of cool if you like Hello Kitty merchandise.
Overall, the INQ Cloud Touch feels nice in the hand - it sits well and the 3.5-inch screen, with WVGA resolution, looks clear and is easy to reach. It doesn't pack a weighty, premium feel, but it does have a lot of style and will appeal to many looking for a cheaper phone.
Oh, we liked the HTC Desire. It still sits at the top of our 20 best mobile phones list, proudly casting a belittling eye over HTC's own Desire HD, the Samsung Galaxy S, Google Nexus S and even Apple's iPhone 4 juggernaut.
Though the HTC Desire's technology is now being surpassed, it's aged beautifully thanks to some timely price drops. However, all things must come to an end (or at least be supplanted by something new). The HTC Desire S has arrived to take over from its predecessor in the Android race.
In many ways, it's quite similar. We'll still be looking at a 3.7-inch 480 x 800 screen, Android overlaid with HTC's Sense UI and a 1GHz processor. However, HTC hasn't totally rested on its laurels.
Our colleagues at T3.com grabbed some HTC Desire S video footage which you can watch below.
The RAM is increased for the upgraded Android 2.3, there's now 1GB of built-in memory and it's made with a premium aluminium unibody shell.
The only real disappointment from a spec point of view is that 1GHz processor – it's single-core, while its competitors slowly move to dual-core for the higher-end phones, such as the Samsung Galaxy S2.
While it lacks the processing grunt of the LG Optimus 2X, we commented in our review of that phone that the Android experience wasn't actually made any faster or smoother than the original Desire by the addition of Nvidia's dual-core Tegra 2, so it'll be interesting to see if it can be as slick as ever on one core.
The Desire S also brings improvements in video recording, with 720p HD capture now supported, though the sensor stays at five megapixels.
The wireless technology has also had a welcome boost, with 14.4Mbps HSDPA 3G broadband and Wi-Fi 802.11n support both added.
The battery is also slightly larger (up to 1450mAh, which is still smaller than a lot of the competition), though HTC is claiming as much as a 20 per cent increase in standby and talk time.
It's available SIM-free for a little over £400, but looks set to be free on contract from around £35. We're told the retail version will ship with a microSD card, but the size will vary between retailers – 4GB looks set to be the average.
Announced: 21 Mar 2011 Market Status: Not yet released Release date: unknown
LG Thrill 4G, is the first US version of the LG Optimus 3D. It features a glasses-free 4.3" parallax barrier LCD display with 480x800 pixels, blazing fast 1GHz dual-core TI OMAP4 chipset, and two 5MP cameras on the back that allow for stereoscopic stills and video capture. The frame rate is 30fps for 1080p Full HD in 2D mode, and 24fps for the 720p HD 3D video capture.
Announced: 21 Mar 2011 Market Status: Not yet released Release date: unknown
HTC HD7S is a re-branded version of the HTC HD7. The phone is equipped with a 4.3-inch WVGA Super LCD display which is the largest in the WP7 lineup, but even more intriguing is the fact that the phone will ship with an updated version of Microsoft's platform supporting copy and paste. On the hardware side you get a 1GHz single-core processor, while in the camera department you have a 5-megapixel snapper.
Mozilla’s latest mobile browser, Firefox 4, officially launches today after months of testing.
The browser brings features like Firefox Sync — which synchronizes tabs, personal data, and settings from Firefox 4 on any other platform — and a new interface that does away with distracting menus and icons. And of course, it’s also blazing fast.
Firefox 4 for Android shows just how innovative apps can be with an open mobile OS like Android. Apple’s iPhone OS doesn’t allow for any third-party browsers to use rendering engines of their own, which means that it would be impossible for Mozilla to release the browser on the iPhone as it is. Undoubtedly, Firefox 4 is one of the few Android apps that will inspire envy among iPhone users.
Mozilla does offer an iPhone app, Firefox Home, which includes the Firefox sync feature. But it relies on Apple’s WebKit browser rendering engine, which means that in practice it isn’t that much different from the iPhone’s native Safari browser.
One aspect of the mobile Firefox 4 that I really appreciate is its ingenious user interface that lets webpages fill the entire screen. To access open tabs, you simply swipe right on your device’s screen. To access settings, swipe left. The address bar is at the top of the screen, natch, but it also disappears as you scroll down a page. On mobile devices, where screen real estate is precious, I appreciated Mozilla’s concerted effort to make as much of the screen available as possible.
Mozilla claims that Firefox 4 is up to three times faster than Android’s built-in browser. After testing the browser on a Samsung Galaxy Tab, the speed difference was noticeable. Mozilla even managed to include extensions support in the browser, which the desktop version of Firefox popularized.
Firefox 4 also brings support for advanced HTML5, which will allow Web publishers to implement features like location-aware browsing (using your device’s GPS), device orientation (which would allow sites to show you different content based on how you’re holding your device), and even build games completely out of HTML.
The browser doesn’t include support for Adobe Flash at the moment — which is the biggest knock against it, since Flash support is one of Android’s big selling points. Mozilla says it’s looking to add Flash in the future, it just wasn’t fast enough to include in time for Firefox 4’s launch.
For some reason, Mozilla is also releasing Firefox 4 on Nokia’s Maemo platform today, an operating system that’s only available on Nokia’s N900 smartphone.
Research in Motion founder and co-CEO Mike Lazaridis hit the stage at RIM’s BlackBerry Developers Conference in San Francisco today, where he unveiled the company’s long-awaited tablet — the BlackBerry Playbook.
He described the device as a “BlackBerry amplified” experience. The PlayBook has a 7-inch display, runs a WebKit browser (the same browser framework used on the iPhone and Android’s browser, not to mention RIM’s BlackBerry 6), and it supports HTML5 and Adobe Flash. Under the hood, it sports a dual-core 1Ghz processor and 1GB of RAM. The Playbook has front (3-megapixel) and rear (5MP) cameras, both of which support high-definition video. It can play back 1080p HD video with hardware acceleration, and it also has an HDMI port to output content to your television. The HDMI output also has the ability to display different content than the PlayBook’s screen, making it ideal for presentations.
As we suspected, the device is running an entirely new operating system from QNX Software (pronounced “kinnix”). QNX founder Dan Dodge said that the software will “enable things that you have never seen before.” Over 230 models of cars are using QNX software, Dodge said, and it’s also used in networking and power grid devices. “We’ve taken the experience from all these industries, and we’ve taken the past year to build this BlackBerry OS,” he continued.
The PlayBook offers an “amplified” view of what’s already on your BlackBerry — thanks to a clever function which gives the tablet access to files on your BlackBerry via Bluetooth tethering. The PlayBook also doesn’t have 3G access of its own, but since it can pair up with your BlackBerry phone for mobile internet, you don’t have to pay for another data contract.
RIM CTO of Software David Yach emphasized that voice is still the “killer app” for mobile phones — but that didn’t stop RIM from creating “Super Apps”, which he describes as apps that are so seamlessly integrated that you won’t know you’re multitasking. “An app tells you the temperature. A Super App integrates with your calendar to tell you to bring an umbrella to Seattle,” he said. The demonstration mainly focused on Super Apps on BlackBerry phones, but it definitely seems like something we’ll see in tablet apps as well.
RIM didn’t offer any exact pricing or release date information for the PlayBook — other than it expects to release the tablet in early 2011.
Given the little we’ve seen, the BlackBerry PlayBook seems like a worthy tablet entry for RIM. It’s inextricably linked to BlackBerry phones, much like Palm’s defunct Foleo project, but it’s done so in a way that actually seems useful to BlackBerry users.
More video footage for the BlackBerry faithful today, as a few video tutorials of the BlackBerry Touch Monaco have hit the net waves and of course we have said video tutorials for our reader’s viewing pleasure below.
The BlackBerry Touch Monaco tutorial videos come our way courtesy of the guys over at Ubergizmo and by way of the Crackberry guys, and just like the BlackBerry Touch Dakota tutorial videos we posted yesterday, these videos offer much the same footage.
There are five short videos in all covering the BlackBerry Monaco SIM insertion, making a call, the home screen, basic functions and the BlackBerry Monaco hardware, all lasting just roughly three minutes in total.
Apparently the word is that BlackBerry maker research In Motion has requested the videos be removed, which could mean that RIM is gearing up to release the BlackBerry Monaco at some point in the not too distant future.
So are any of our readers considering picking up the BlackBerry Monaco once RIM get round to delivering the device to the masses?
For BlackBerry developers Research In Motion has now made their BlackBerry Messenger Social Platform an official public beta enabling BlackBerry developers to take advantage of the popular BlackBerry Messenger service.
With the release of the BlackBerry Messenger Social Platform beta BlackBerry developers can now access and update fields such as status, personal messages and avatar in the user’s profile, gain access to API’s and features enabling the building of important functions into apps, create custom areas in the user’s profile, embed and initiate chats with friends, make file transfers and more.
BlackBerry developers will also be able to test the exact workflow and BBM integration that they can expect to see on a live device, which is accomplished via special simulators for BlackBerry OS 5.0 and BlackBerry OS 6.
Furthermore, full support for the BlackBerry WebWorks platform is planned to be added in April allowing developers to take advantage of the features found in the BlackBerry Messenger Social platform.
For those wishing to download the BlackBerry Messenger SDK you can do so by hitting up the BBM Social Platform page, while a guide and further info for the social platform can be found by going here.
There always seems to be quite a few OS leaks when it comes to the BlackBerry smartphone platform, and we haven’t covered one in a while so we though we’d bring the latest unofficial BlackBerry OS 6 leak to your attention today.
According to the guys over at Crackberry, by way of Bbh-plus, the latest release is OS 6.0.0.524 and is for the BlackBerry Curve 3G 9330, and there isn’t anything known about what the new OS may contain feature wise so far.
Obviously OS 6.0.0.524 for the BlackBerry Curve 3G 9330 is unofficial so if Curve 3G 9330 owners download and install they do so at their own risk, but if you do then feel free to share what OS 6.0.0.524 delivers in our comments area below.
Our usual disclaimer, as this OS is not an official BlackBerry OS release from research In Motion or BlackBerry carrier the risk associated with downloading and installing is down to the user, and it may be in your best interest to wait for an official version release.
