June 2009 Archives

Unlike Riz, who has the good fortune to try new products often, I'm usually a smartphone or two behind our experts. But, as it turned out, managing this blog came with a set of perks all its own -- I get to play around with new products too!

A few weeks back I got to play with the BlackBerry® Tour™ smartphone, which today we announced is expected to be available from carriers in North America beginning later this summer. I also managed to wrangle an interview with Shaun, one of the many brains behind RIM's latest smartphone, because let's not kid ourselves, you'd much rather hear his views on the BlackBerry Tour than mine (I know my place *sigh*).

One of the most common questions I get asked when I am chatting with my friends and family is, “Where are you?”
 
If you are using BlackBerry® Messenger, we have a neat way to send your location to your friends. Choose “Send Location” while you are in the conversation screen.*

After the release of Facebook® for BlackBerry® smartphones version 1.5 you told us we were missing some important features in our application, like the ability to view Photos and Profiles.  Well, we’ve been working hard and are excited to have these features available for you now in the new Facebook for BlackBerry version 1.6 release.

Congratulations, you’ve just bought a new BlackBerry® smartphone to replace your slightly aging device…wait, you were using a BlackBerry 6210? Wow. Welcome to the future, where the world is in color.

Now that you have your shiny new smartphone, the first thing you want to do is make sure that you get your email delivered there instead of to the old one. (It may not really be the first thing you want to do, but I’m the email product manager, so hang in there.) Making the swap is pretty straightforward.

A co-worker the other day told me a great story.  His mom had just come back from vacation with what she thought was a great innovation – add zoom functionality to the camera. After explaining that BlackBerry® smartphone cameras do have a zoom, it made us think – what other features don’t people know about the camera?

Probably the biggest one is that you can easily share photos with friends or your online communities. After you’ve taken your photo, you can start sharing it within two clicks.