Hasta La Gadget!

Right now BBM is available for BlackBerry (naturally), and recently iOS and Android, but what about Windows Phone? Will BlackBerry be sending some love Microsoft’s way? Well according to Twitter account, BlackBerry Leaks, the answer is yes. The tweet has claimed that BBM will eventually be making its way onto Windows Phone, essentially covering all the major smartphone platforms out there. Of course there’s no telling if this rumor is true but it would make sense that BlackBerry would love to cover all their bases, even if the Windows Phone platform is considered to be their closest rival at the moment.

It was speculated that BBM would skip Windows Phone simply because Microsoft was BlackBerry’s biggest competitor, but we guess covering more ground does make sense to a certain degree as well. In any case like the tweet says, the app will arrive on Windows Phone as a web, tablet, as well as a desktop version. It is not clear if this applies to only Windows-based devices, or if the tweet was referring to all tablets (including iOS and Android tablets), so take it with a grain of salt for now and we’ll wait and see if anything comes from it. In the meantime, are Windows Phone owners excited that BBM could potentially be making its way to your device?

BBM Rumored To Arrive On Windows Phone As Well original content from Ubergizmo.

Qardio co-founder Marco Peluso had a dedicated career in finance for 14 years. He was an investment banker for JPMorgan, then a partner at a hedge fund.

But everything changed when his father had a stroke while they were on the phone.

“I was lucky enough to understand what was happening,” he said, remembering that he quickly got in touch with a neighbor to take his father to the hospital. But doctors couldn’t identify what triggered the minor stroke, known as a TIA, or Transient Ischemic Attack.

Six months later, his father found himself struggling to finish his usual morning jog.

“It was shocking for me to know that even now, we didn’t have a good way of understanding or proving what was happening,” he said.

He was compelled to leave his banking and investment career to start Qardio, which is set to launch an ECG monitor for consumers next year at a price of $449. They also have a second product, a blood pressure monitor called QardioArm that will retail for $99.

The ECG monitoring device, called the QardioCore, streams data to the owner’s phone and can even send it on to a person’s health care provider through a cloud-based service. It lets a doctor “see” a patient without really seeing them in person.

Peluso says his QardioCore product is less effort-intensive than other sophisticated monitors, which might require skin patches, shaving a person’s chest or adhesive gel.

“It doesn’t require any skin preparation,” he said. “You put it on your chest, it switches itself on when it detects your body, then wirelessly sends signals to your iPhone, which then go to our server.”

He says the two devices fix a major problem in health monitoring because they make ECG and blood pressure-tracking much more passive, meaning doctors can collect a stream of data and put it in context instead of taking one-off measurements.

Peluso and his co-founder had a team of industrial designers and engineers work on designing both the QardioArm and QardioCore for the past year. They manufacture in Southeast Asia and plan to retail both devices online and through brick-and-mortar partnerships early next year.

BBM for iOS and Android is without doubt a success, given that the app saw 10 million downloads in a 24-hour period. However like we mentioned last time, the 10 million downloads might not necessarily mean 10 million active iOS and Android BBM users since there was a queue that one would have to place themselves in to start using the service. Presumably this was put into place to help take the load off BlackBerry’s servers from the influx of iOS and Android users. Well the good news is that if you have yet to download BBM for iOS and Android, you’re in luck because BlackBerry has since announced that the queue to use the app has since been removed and now everyone can download and start using the app right away.

It is surprising that BBM for iOS and Android turned out to be such a hit. After all sales of the company’s hardware is anything but a commercial success, so we guess there are some aspects and services of BlackBerry that users out there on other platforms can appreciate, but perhaps not as an entire package. There has been talk about BlackBerry possibly spinning off BBM into a separate company and given the success of its app (we’ll have to see if the momentum can continue), perhaps it would make sense that BlackBerry would dedicate themselves to it.

BlackBerry Removes Queue For BBM For iOS And Android original content from Ubergizmo.

So yesterday we reported on the possibility of a bug in the Mac App Store that allowed users running trial versions of the iWork suite (amongst other software) to upgrade to full versions for free. Well it turns out that the bug might not necessarily be a bug after all. This is according to J. Glenn Künzler over at MacTrast when he managed to upgrade his version of Aperture for free. He then proceed to test this out with a DVD version of iLife ’09 and found that it worked as well, which is when he decided to reach out to a contact at Apple to find out what was going on and if they were planning on fixing the bug. (more…)

Mac App Store Bug Might Not Be A Bug After All original content from Ubergizmo.

Back at WWDC, Apple invited the robotics company Anki on to the stage to show off its connected toy car game, Drive, in which physical toy cars sail around a track while you control them with your iOS device. It was seriously impressive. iFixit got their hands on an Anki Drive set, and like spoiled children, set about dismantling their new toys.

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