Inside BlackBerry » BlackBerry PlayBook 2.0

Remote Control feature in BlackBerry Bridge 2.0 lets you control your BlackBerry PlayBook with your BlackBerry smartphone

Ty Williams — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 20:18:42 +0000

Please welcome Julianna, writing a guest post today on a great new feature of BlackBerry® PlayBook™ OS 2.0…read on! – Ed.

One of my favorite new features in BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0 is the ability to use my BlackBerry® smartphone to control my BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet. This feature is particularly useful when my BlackBerry PlayBook tablet is connected to an HDMI®-equipped TV. At home, I can control my BlackBerry PlayBook tablet from my couch and have the contents displayed on my TV with the audio output through my home theater system. At a meeting at work, I can apply the same functionality to share documents, web pages, videos, slideshows and more on a large display screen for everyone to see.

If you haven’t tried this feature already, keep reading to learn how you can do this too!

BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0 Settings Overview

Ty Williams — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 21:33:51 +0000

When the BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet was initially launched, one of the first things I did was explore the various settings offered so I could customize my tablet to my desired preferences. These settings included ‘About,’ ‘Airplane Mode,’ ‘Wi-Fi®,’ ‘Software Updates,’ ‘Bluetooth®,’ ‘BlackBerry® ID,’ ‘Accounts,’ ‘BlackBerry® Bridge™,’ BlackBerry® Balance™,’ ‘Internet Tethering,’ ‘Screen,’ ‘HDMI,’ ‘Sounds & Notifications,’ ‘General,’ ‘Storage & Sharing,’ ‘Security,’ ‘Language,’ ‘Keyboard,’ and ‘Date & Time.’

With the release of BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0, a few new settings have been introduced, so today, I’d like to share with you an overview of the settings available to you, some useful tips and of course, where you can learn more.

How BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0 revolutionizes Email, Calendar and Contacts – again: Part 1 of 2

Michael C. — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 19:14:56 +0000

In January at CES 2012 and at BlackBerry® DevCon Europe, you had some great opportunities to get sneak peeks at what the BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet OS 2.0 has to offer. We heard loud and clear that you wanted native email, calendar and contacts, and we’ve delivered something that we’re all very proud of. With BlackBerry PlayBook tablet OS 2.0, features like your email, calendar and contacts have unique social integration that is people-centric rather than app-centric.
The approach to these experiences is simple: If you think about how you interact with email, calendar, and contacts on a daily basis, you’re basically in two modes: triage (taking stock of what’s happening in your world) and acting.

Email and the Universal Inbox

The new Messages apps gives a nod to the past by continuing to build on proven experiences. The iconic BlackBerry splat noting the arrival of new messages in the universal inbox remains part of the core messaging experience. But the BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0 messaging experience goes a step further; it has been extended to include ‘social messaging’, allowing you to directly integrate messages from some of the most common social networks: Facebook®, LinkedIn®, and Twitter®.

And to take it one step beyond just integrated social messaging, you can now see a contact’s social details right from the Messages application.

Once you have an inbox full of messages, the new Messages app delivers a suite of features that help make managing your inbox really easy:

Tabbed email: You can reference one email while you compose another, or put an email you’re in the middle of composing on hold, while you type out a quick response to another message.

Rich text editing: You can write and edit email like you would on a computer – including support for fonts, attributes and sizes, as well as formatting. You can even edit or insert your “in-line” comments in an email thread.

Message Threading and Quick response: Let’s face it – in an era of ubiquitous mobile devices, email is more chat-like than formal. You can choose to view your messages as threaded conversations rather than single messages. Thread messages reduce a conversation to one inbox entry, thus reducing the signal-to-noise ratio in your inbox.

BlackBerry Keyboard: Longtime users know the keyboard input on BlackBerry smartphones is clever, including auto-entry of periods at the end of sentences and “@” symbols for email addresses. The new PlayBook OS 2.0 keyboard also introduces next word prediction, which helps makes hammering out emails on a virtual keyboard so much easier.

Search: Sometimes you’re not exactly sure what you’re looking for. The search feature allows you to type out a partial string and constrain the search to specific recipient fields or subject, sent, received, and filter by when it was received (today, yesterday, even last week) – all in real time.

As you can see, there are some very cool things in the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet messaging experience. Hold tight for my next post on the Calendar and Contacts experience!

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BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0 Brings Updates to Docs to Go and a Brand New App: Print To Go

Luke Reimer — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 22:54:06 +0000

BlackBerry® PlayBook™ OS 2.0 will bring significant enhancements to the Documents To Go® suite, as well as the addition of a brand new application: Print To Go. The Docs To Go office suite has a history of being a staple for working while on the go, allowing you to create, edit, and share Microsoft® Office documents. Print To Go makes it quick and easy to transfer in electronic format, any content that you could print from your PC to the BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet, instead of printing a hardcopy. Together these solutions offer you a productive and familiar way to work with files and reference important data.

For those that are unfamiliar with Docs To Go, it is a powerful mobile office suite that allows you to view and edit Microsoft Word, Excel®, and PowerPoint® files and attachments on BlackBerry® smartphones and BlackBerry PlayBook tablets. You also have the ability to present PowerPoint documents from your BlackBerry PlayBook by plugging into a projector or TV via an HDMI connection. While in presenter mode, speaking notes are visible on your PlayBook, while your presentation itself is visible from the projector or TV. Updates to BlackBerry® Bridge™ in PlayBook OS 2.0 further enhance this feature by allowing you to control “back” and “next” functionality using your BlackBerry smartphone.