Hasta La Gadget!

BlackBerry PlayBook gets demoed in portrait mode originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 03 Feb 2011 17:06:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s no secret that RIM’s PlayBook is going to need a connection to a nearby BlackBerry phone to do much of its corporate heavy lifting, and a new video posted by the company today shows a little more detail on exactly how that’ll look. The one-minute, 54-second spot spends much of its time in the tablet’s email app, demonstrating how the Playbook and the Torch beside it are perfectly in sync — read an email on one, it immediately shows read on the other, and so on. We also learn that any secured corporate data that you’re using on the PlayBook while tethered is essentially on loan — it’ll disappear as soon as you disconnect, which is one of the reasons RIM’s touting this as a bolt-on for any corporate BES environment that won’t require any additional configuration or lines of data service. The video certainly doesn’t do much to appeal to the casual BlackBerry user — you know, the Curve and Pearl types of folks — but it’s an interesting watch nonetheless. Check it after the break.

Continue reading RIM shows PlayBook living in sweet harmony with BlackBerry Torch in new video

RIM shows PlayBook living in sweet harmony with BlackBerry Torch in new video originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 31 Jan 2011 17:46:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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CrackBerry looks to have just gotten the inside scoop on everything RIM has planned for the CDMA side of the wireless divide in 2011 — and as usual, it seems they’ll be supporting it just as well as they do the GSM guys. Going chronologically, first up will be a CDMA PlayBook in the second quarter of the year; so far, Sprint’s WiMAX version (sans CDMA support) is the only carrier-partnered version of the tablet announced. Next comes Montana — a CDMA version of the Dakota — which may come to market as the Bold Touch; as the name implies, you can expect the classic portrait QWERTY Bold form factor with the addition of a touchscreen. Look for that one in the third quarter alongside the Monaco (pictured above), which looks like a much sleeker Storm successor featuring a 1.2GHz Qualcomm core, a 3.7-inch WVGA display, and a 5 megapixel camera with HD video capture. Next, we’ll get a CDMA flavor of the Apollo dubbed Sedona, a next-gen Curve with NFC support; that’ll happen sometime around fall. Finally, looking into early 2012 we’ll get a device codenamed Malibu that looks to be a full-screen Curve Touch with slightly lower specs than the Monaco.

On the technology side, most of these new devices will be adopting a handful of technologies not seen on BlackBerrys before, including digital compasses, NFC, HD video recording and “management,” and better HTML5 media support; they’ll also be getting OpenGL support, mobile hotspot capability, 24-bit color, a better web browser, and an overhauled virtual keyboard by way of BlackBerry OS 6.1, which should be present in everything that gets launched here. Caught up? Given the lack of dual-core processors here — the kind of CPUs Lazaridis says he needs to drop QNX on phones — we’d say “no,” but they might be getting within earshot. Follow the break for a shot of the full roadmap.

Continue reading BlackBerry Monaco Touch, Bold Touch, Sedona, and more leaked for CDMA

BlackBerry Monaco Touch, Bold Touch, Sedona, and more leaked for CDMA originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 27 Jan 2011 19:05:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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RIM’s been hyping AIR apps and web apps for the PlayBook for a while now, but there’s a chance much bigger things are in the works: BGR says the company wants to add in Java compatibility for legacy BlackBerry apps, and that among other options it’s considering using the Dalvik virtual machine found in Android to get there. That makes a lot of sense — Dalvik is one of the most advanced Java(ish) virtual machines out there, and it’s open-source, so RIM could conceivably take it and tweak it to work with existing BlackBerry apps, which are built in Java. Clever, clever.

But that’s not all: BGR goes on to speculate that using Dalvik will also allow the PlayBook and future QNX devices to straight-up run regular Android apps, which is obviously a much bigger deal than simply using the same virtual machine. Exactly how or why BGR’s making that leap is unclear, since running Android apps on the PlayBook would require porting much more than just Dalvik, but it’s out there. In fact, it’s been out there since December 7, when Fortune picked up a note from Gleacher & Company analyst Mark McKechnie suggesting that RIM was planning to offer Android compatibility, so we’re curious if this rumor’s just taking another trip through the internet meat grinder. Honestly, our bet is that RIM is far too proud to offer Android compatibility and that it’s just investigating Dalvik as a Java environment, but we’d love to be proven wrong — we’ll see what happens.

BGR: BlackBerry PlayBook to possibly use Android’s Dalvik virtual machine, might run Android apps originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 26 Jan 2011 14:14:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Hey, can everyone please stop talking about the iPad? RIM’s been skirting around Apple’s tablet, saying only that its upcoming PlayBook slate would have “comparable” battery life, but now it’s dropped all pretense and called the iPad out by name. Specifically, the Canadian company’s senior business marketing VP Jeff McDowell has promised that the PlayBook will offer “equal or greater” battery endurance to Apple’s device, while using a smaller cell size. The latter part isn’t hard to achieve, considering Apple filled most of its slate’s innards with Li-Pol juice packs, but the promise of matching its autonomy from the wall socket is a big claim to make. Many people consider that to be among the iPad’s foremost strengths, so RIM is surely aiming high by pledging to not only match it, but potentially better it. The PlayBook we saw in person wasn’t quite up to that level yet, but there’s still time until that March launch for RIM to turn bold words into a beautiful reality.

RIM: PlayBook battery life will be ‘equal or greater than the iPad with smaller battery size’ originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 24 Jan 2011 19:53:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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