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

Michael C. — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 19:30:30 +0000

The name BlackBerry® is synonymous with mobile email, and thanks to the expertise of RIM® family members – Tungle for Calendar and Gist for Contacts – we’ve extended our messaging DNA in some really compelling ways with the introduction of BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet OS 2.0. Because the new Email, Calendar, and Contacts applications all include people-centric information, we’ve integrated social functionality into all three . For example, you don’t have to leave the calendar to get information about the attendees for that meeting. Let’s dive in and take a look at these new features.

Calendar with social integration

Like the new Messages app that includes a universal Inbox, so you can conveniently manage all your email in one place, the new Calendar app in PlayBook OS 2.0 allows you to manage all your appointments and events in one place – including the ability to manage both work and personal (Gmail®, Hotmail®, Yahoo!®) appointments and Facebook® events (never miss a birthday again!). Of course, the Calendar app offers the common features that you’ve come to know and love, but it now also includes some compelling new features to help you organize your day:

People View: In addition to the traditional Day, Agenda, Week, Month views, you can now view your day based on the people you’re meeting with. This view provides additional information on your contacts pulled from LinkedIn®, including where you’ve met in the past.

Visual Cues: You’ll be able to more quickly scan and manage your calendar at a glance. For example, the Calendar app provides visual cues that identify days that have more appointments than those that are relatively light. For example, when you view your calendar at a glance, dates with many appointments will show up in a larger font while the dates in smaller fonts have fewer appointments. If you have a lot of appointment conflicts, a red highlight identifies the conflict so you can’t miss them!

Zoom in to a detailed view: From the “Week” view, you can go directly to a day’s calendar with ease. Simply tap any day to zoom into the details of that day, including the meetings you have scheduled and the people you will be meeting with.

Contacts: Your social hub

Your contacts are more than just an address and phone number, so why treat it like a rolodex? The new Contacts app acts as a social hub that helps you maintain a complete and current view of your contact’s social status.

Contact Linking: The majority of people use more than email and phone to stay in touch with their personal and professional contacts — Facebook, Twitter®, and LinkedIn are growing exponentially in their popularity and usability. The Contacts app allows you to automatically bring all these distinct social profiles into a single people-centric view in your address book – meaning you can set up one contact name and integrate all of their contact and social profile information into one profile. You also have the option to reduce duplicate entries, and manually link or de-couple your contacts from social profiles. Watch this demo to learn more.

Status Updates and People Views: Using information gathered from Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, the Contacts app lets you see your contact’s recent social status updates and common friends.

Meetings, Places, and News: Be prepared before walking into that meeting. For each of your contacts, you can view past (and future) meetings with that person, see the places you’ve met previously, and read news about their company.

Favorites and Video Chat: Mark your top contacts as a “favorite” for quicker access, and sort your address book by those contacts who also use BlackBerry PlayBook Video Chat.

Explore tablet hardware
Using the tablet interface
BlackBerry Bridge
Personalization

Docs To Go
Print To Go
Calendar
Contacts

Video Player
Messages
Video Chat
Browsing the web

We built the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet OS 2.0 email, calendar and contacts experience with the goal of providing the best tools for managing your busy life across all of your networks. I’m so proud of the team for pulling it off, and we’re just getting started! We have a ton of ideas, and look forward to getting your feedback.

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!