Hasta La Gadget!

You’d think working for a big tech company would have its gadget-related perks and in Dell’s case that’s very much true. The big PC vendor has demonstrated its commitment to building up its own smartphone services by offering to trade employees’ old and busted BlackBerry devices for the shiny new hotness that is the Venue Pro. If everyone takes up Round Rock on its offer, there’ll be 25,000 RIM smartphones looking for new homes soon, along with a sprightly start to Windows Phone 7‘s time in the limelight. The Wall Street Journal reports this’ll cut Dell’s mobile communications bill by a quarter, thanks to no longer having to support BlackBerry servers, while also noting that Android variants will be made available in the future as well. Where there’s Lightning, there’s gotta be Thunder, right?

Dell offering free Venue Pros to employees in exchange for their BlackBerrys originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 05 Nov 2010 06:53:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Allow us to clarify, the colors are “fresh” as in “new,” not as in “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.” Don’t get us wrong, though: white almost always looks fresh (in the Fresh Prince sense) on a phone, and the Torch seems to be no exception — partly thanks to the matching white keyboard. As expected, it’ll be coming in red and white and will be available on November 7 (a day before the HTC Surround and Samsung Focus, interestingly) at the same time as a sweet new promotion that’ll allow folks to buy any two accessories from AT&T and get a third one of equal or lesser value for free. Don’t violate any fire codes stuffing yourselves into your local stores, alright? Follow the break for the press release.

Continue reading BlackBerry Torch coming to AT&T in two fresh colors next month

BlackBerry Torch coming to AT&T in two fresh colors next month originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 28 Oct 2010 14:50:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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RIM has now uploaded the full video of its PlayBook’s brief stint in the limelight during Adobe MAX yesterday, where Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch and none other than Mr. BlackBerry himself, RIM co-CEO Mike Lazaridis, take the “professional tablet” through its very first public test drive on the keynote stage. The duo run through an MRI scan viewing app — presumably in an attempt to woo the lucrative medical market — along with the PlayBook’s Air-based video player and browser-embedded Flash player, both of which seem to work pretty well. We also get a quick look at the tablet’s multitasking cards, where we see that apps continue to function even from within their card views; it looks pretty nice, but at a glance, it doesn’t do any tricks webOS wasn’t pulling off a year ago.

Interestingly, the edited video has a number of cuts — some seem like harmless attempts to cut out boring parts, but there are a couple suspicious ones where we suspect something unsavory happened on the PlayBook or it ran just a little slower than RIM would’ve liked (of course, with the PlayBook’s release still months out, they’ve got plenty of time to tighten that up while they wait for developers to submit their wares in exchange for a free PlayBook of their own). At the end, Lazaridis expertly skirts Lynch’s question of when exactly the device will be released… and he didn’t even need a seasoned PR rep standing next to him to deflect it! Follow the break for the full demo.

Continue reading BlackBerry PlayBook demoed courtesy of RIM’s Mike Lazaridis and Adobe’s Kevin Lynch

BlackBerry PlayBook demoed courtesy of RIM’s Mike Lazaridis and Adobe’s Kevin Lynch originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 26 Oct 2010 12:23:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’ve already known that Adobe would be bringing Flash Player 10.1 to Windows Phone 7, but the company has just now made that fully official at its currently-happening MAX conference (alongside its Air 2.5 announcement), and it’s also confirmed exactly which other mobile platforms the plug-in will be headed to. That includes WebOS 2.0, which we’ve already seen first hand, along with BlackBerry OS, Symbian, MeeGo and, last but not least, the LiMo platform — those will all of course join Android 2.2, which already supports the plug-in. Unfortunately, there’s still no timeline for a release on each platform, with Adobe only saying that Flash 10.1 is “expected” to hit each mobile OS. Head on past the break for the relevant snippet from Adobe’s press release.

Continue reading Adobe confirms Flash Player 10.1 is coming to BlackBerry, Windows Phone 7 and more

Adobe confirms Flash Player 10.1 is coming to BlackBerry, Windows Phone 7 and more originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 25 Oct 2010 17:31:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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RIM’s PlayBook just got real — quite literally — at Adobe’s MAX conference today. Granted, out-of-the-box Flash and Air support are being billed as a big deal for the PlayBook, but it still seems a little strange that the company showed non-functional dummies running video loops encased in Plexiglas at its developer conference just a few weeks back, only to let Adobe show the good stuff at its own event here. There is some logic behind it, for what it’s worth: Adobe and RIM have announced availability today of an Air SDK targeting the PlayBook’s QNX-based platform with deep hardware integration, giving devs plenty of ramp-up time considering that the tablet won’t be available until early next year. Kobo was among the companies on-hand to talk about the sheer awesomeness of the dev environment, and the general attitude toward the PlayBook’s ease of development seems to be a positive one; we all know how important third-party apps are to a mobile platform’s success at this point, of course, so we’ll need a few thousand more Kobos on board to leave these guys with a happy ending. Check the full demo from the MAX keynote stage after the break.

Update: RIM co-CEO Mike Lazaridis — who was up on stage with Adobe’s Kevin Lynch for the demo — announced that devs who get PlayBook apps approved into App World will get a free PlayBook. Not a bad incentivizer, if we do say so ourselves.

Continue reading BlackBerry PlayBook demoed in the flesh at Adobe MAX, Air-based SDK launched

BlackBerry PlayBook demoed in the flesh at Adobe MAX, Air-based SDK launched originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 25 Oct 2010 14:33:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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