Posts Tagged ‘BlackBerry’

Want a BlackBerry Playbook early?

Sunday, June 12th, 2011

If you are desperate to get your hands on the upcoming BlackBerry Playbook tablet then the Carphone Warehouse may be able to help you. They have a new concessions store opened in Selfridges, London and you will be able to get your hands on the new tablet from Wednesday (15th June) 24 hours ahead of the official launch.

Visitors to the store who have a demo of the PlayBook will receive a goodie bag and the chance to win a PlayBook and a BlackBerry Torch. The PlayBook will also be available at Carphone Warehouse stores in Manchester Trafford Park, Bluewater Shopping Centre, Bristol Cribbs and London Westfield.

BlackBerry PlayBook

BlackBerry PlayBook

The Playbook is a 7” tablet with built in WiFi support and comes in 16Gb, 32Gb, and 64Gb options priced at around £399, £479 and £559, price wise it is a competitor for the iPad though it is a smaller screen. It boasts a 1Ghz dual core chip, 1GB of RAM and two cameras , a front 3 megapixel front facing camera and a 5 megapixel rear facing camera and an OS powered by QNX technology.

From the promo videos I have seen it looks a nice machine and there are plenty of apps available for it already. I doubt that we will see the queues and hysteria that surrounded the launch of the iPad 2 but being from BlackBerry there are enough BlackBerry fanboys out there to mean that the device has a chance of surviving in the already crowded tablet market.

Personally I’m undecided whether I want to invest in a PlayBook yet. The fact that you need a BlackBerry phone to tether it to the Internet is not ideal although I doubt I would ever really use it away from home as I usually take my iPad when I am on business. I’ll put some thought into it over these next couple of days and might invest.

Will you be going buying a PlayBook, let me know if you do and what you think of it.

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BlackBerry Playbook Set to Launch in UK June 16th

Thursday, May 19th, 2011
Blackberry Playbook

BlackBerry PlayBook set to launch on June 16th

It has been announced by BlackBerry that the UK launch of the Playbook, their first tablet, will take place on June 16th. The tablet has a 7″ screen, Cortex A9 based dual 1 GHz processor, 1 GB of RAM and dual cameras, 3 Meg front facing and 5 Meg rear . It does not use either Apple’s iOS or Google’s Android operating systems but instead has it own that was developed by QNX, who are also owned by RIM. It will come in three memory sizes 16Gb, 32 Gb and 64Gb and prices are expected to be £399, £479 and £559 respectively. The PlayBook will be available from Best Buy, Carphone Warehouse, Currys, Dixons, PC World and Phones4U.

The tablet market is getting very crowded and I cannot see this device being the fabled “iPad Killer”. I do believe it will be able to sustain a small share of the market though. The use of BlackBerry smartphones within the business sector may make it the tablet of choice for the enterprise market as long as they can get the right sort of apps. I do find the naming of the PlayBook interesting, BlacklBerry are renowned for their smartphones that are aimed primarily at a business market and yet this is called the PlayBook rather than the WorkBook. I think this shows that RIM are looking at trying to appeal to a wider market, when it was launched in the US RIM said that it was the perfect platform for playing games on. There are also enough BlackBerry fanboys out there who should see that the device survivies through to a second iteration.

Do you think you will be buying one?

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New Facebook Places Launched, but do you get it?

Thursday, August 19th, 2010

Facebook announces launch of geo location service Facebook PlacesFacebook have announced a geo-location feature for the worlds most popular social network. It will allow you to check in to locations very like other geo services like Gowalla and Foursquare. In fact both of these companies were at the launch and talked about their plans to integrate further their products with Facebook. You will also be able to tag places as well as people in photographs. The fact that you can tag a person to a place has already raised privacy concerns.

Facebook released a new version of Facebook for the iPhone, which I downloaded this morning. Unfortunately the new service is being rolled out to users over time and needless to say that Blackburn has not been part of the initial roll out. So I know that Facebook Places exists, but cannot do anything with it yet. There is no update to the Android version of Facebook and I am reliably informed that the BlackBerry version has not been updated either. Nor can I see it in a browser on either my laptop or the touch version on my Nexus One. In short, I’ve got it, but I can’t get it!

I currently use both Gowalla and Foursquare, but I am the only person out of my circle of friends to do so, most of who are on Facebook so it will be interesting to see whether they adopt this new feature. Personally I think that they will. The reason they have not used Foursquare or Gowalla is doubt to ignorance of their existence. By having the facility within Facebook it will allow them to take advantage of the service without having to go to any other sites.

So I guess this is the real reason that Facebook are doing this. If you can keep people on your site for longer you stop them using other services. If you can stop them using other services you start to gain control of the Net in general. If you can control the part of the Net people are accessing then you can charge a premium rate for advertising in that space. At the launch yesterday Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that they had no plans to monetise Facebook Places. He won’t need to, if things go his way then he will be able to bring in more advertising to Facebook in general.

Slightly off topic, I noticed that after I updated the iPhone Facebook App that when I update a status there is a little padlock icon under the input box that allows me to choose who I share this status with, Friends only, Friends of Friends, Everybody. Good little addition I thought. It is also on the main Facebook site, but as I tend to only access FB through my phone I do not know if this is new or has been there a while.

Will you be using Facebook Places? Can you use Facebook Pages? Leave me a comment and let me know.

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