Last night while visiting with a friend, they asked me how to clear their BlackBerry 10 browser history. Long story short, he had been visiting some jewelry websites and since his significant other uses his device from time to time, he didn’t want her to stumble across a surprise she’d be receiving shortly. Without further ado, here’s how to clear your browsing history.
Continue reading how-to at the Inside BlackBerry Help blog »

1. Browser: Surfing the web on your BlackBerry smartphone has never been faster with this snappy OS. With BlackBerry 7 OS smartphones, pages load faster — and when you’re on the go, speed matters. Check out this video comparing previous BlackBerry® Curve™ smartphones with the slick BlackBerry Curve 9350 smartphone running BlackBerry 7 OS:

[YouTube link for mobile viewing ]

2. Fast Fluid Graphics: The graphics behind the BlackBerry smartphone OS have been improved with BlackBerry 7 OS. You’ll get new visually appealing icons along with fluid transitions. Combine that with more powerful hardware and higher-resolution screens and you’re in for a rich smartphone experience. So, your photos are brighter onscreen, your game experience is faster, smoother and crisper, and your ability to swipe, scroll and launch is more intuitive, quicker, and satisfying. Take a look at this video comparing the all-touch BlackBerry® Torch™ 9850 smartphone with the BlackBerry® Storm™ 9550 smartphone running a previous generation BlackBerry OS:

[YouTube link for mobile viewing ]

3. Touch Screens: Of course, not all BlackBerry 7 OS smartphones have touch screens, but a number of them do, and I love how much quicker you can navigate around your device. For me, when I’m looking at messages, I can simply tap the one I want to read rather than scroll through them all. Or when I want to open an app from the home screen, again, I can simply tap the one I want. You can also pinch-to-zoom on things like photos and websites. See for yourself — watch this video to see a side-by-side comparison of the BlackBerry® Bold™ 9700 smartphone and BlackBerry Bold 9900 smartphone:

[YouTube link for mobile viewing ]

There you have our top 3 reasons to upgrade to a BlackBerry 7 OS smartphone! Hopefully this was helpful for those of you using older BlackBerry smartphones and thinking of upgrading. Feel free to let us know what you think in the comments, and if you’re currently rocking a BlackBerry 7 OS smartphone, tell us what you like the most about it!

1. Show and Hide the Keyboard

Whenever you need to quickly access the keyboard, just swipe in from the bottom left of the bezel. To hide the keyboard when you are finished, tap on the hide keyboard button that appears in the bottom left corner.

Read more at the Inside BlackBerry Help Blog »

The BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet browser is far more than a simple application for viewing web pages. It has been carefully designed to provide an enhanced tablet experience, complete with options for customizing the browsing experience, private browsing, bookmarks management, HTML 5.0, Adobe® Flash® and JavaScript® capabilities, location-aware features, and so much more. Consider this powerful tool to be a window into not only viewing and interacting with a variety of web sites, but to also access powerful enterprise web applications.

There are a number of complete and secure web app solutions that you and your business can take advantage of – apps that are designed to offer new ways to collaborate in real time. Access to your internal enterprise network may also be possible from your BlackBerry PlayBook tablet through supported VPN suppliers.

Research In Motion® (RIM®) has a large number of enterprise software partners in the mobile industry, and we are constantly working with them to deliver apps and access to web-based hosted solutions optimized for the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet. This means that employees will be able to use existing tools while on the go.

I’m sure at this point you’re looking for examples. Well, here are seven of our favorite enterprise apps that are BlackBerry PlayBook tablet browser-ready!

Read more at the Inside BlackBerry for Business Blog »

Happy Friday #TeamBlackBerry! Since the new BlackBerry® 7 smartphones based on the BlackBerry® 7 OS are now available, here are five tips that every BlackBerry 7 smartphone user should know!

1. Add Music, Pictures and Videos to the Home Screen

On top of being able to add a shortcut on your home screen to get quick access to websites, contacts and files, you also have the ability to add shortcuts to music, pictures and videos. For example, you can create a new folder on your home screen and add some of your favorite albums or playlists. Before we start, add a new folder – while on the home screen, press the Menu key and select Add Folder.

1. Browse to a website, or highlight the item (i.e. Playlist) that you want to create a shortcut for.
2. Press the Menu key and select Add to Home Screen.

• To change the name of the shortcut, type a new name.
• To change the location where the shortcut appears, change the Location field.
• To add the shortcut to your Favorites panel, select the Mark as Favorite checkbox.

3. Click Add.

Read more at the Inside BlackBerry Help Blog »

Welcome to the first Five Tip Friday here at the Inside BlackBerry® Help Blog, where I plan on sharing five tips and tricks on all things BlackBerry® smartphone and BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet! I want to pass along any tips and tricks you care to share as well, so make sure you leave a comment so I can include it in the future.

For our first week, here are a few of my tips while using the browser on a BlackBerry PlayBook tablet:

1. Double tap to zoom in and out while browsing the Web

If you are viewing a blog – let’s say the Inside BlackBerry Help Blog – and you want to zoom in on a post, you can pinch to zoom or double tap, which I like because it zooms in the right on the column. To zoom out again, just repeat the process.

To help show what I mean, I’ve placed a red X where I was tapping on the screen. Here is a screenshot before double tapping on the red X:

Read more at the Inside BlackBerry Help Blog »

Here at Research In Motion®, we are very proud of the BlackBerry® Browser and its performance, especially on the upcoming BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet. We are building one of the best uncompromised browsing experiences on a tablet with support for the latest industry standards and technologies, including HTML5 and Adobe® Flash® 10.1.

Today, we are proud to announce that we have launched an updated version of the BlackBerry® Tablet OS simulator, which embeds the full BlackBerry Browser. With this updated simulator, our web development community can now start testing their web applications and Adobe Flash applications to ensure that they fully support the upcoming BlackBerry PlayBook tablet at launch.

Read more at the Inside BlackBerry Developer’s Blog »

Inside BlackBerry® blog readers might recognize the hand in the photo above as the same one featured in our recent BlackBerry® PlayBook™ Web Fidelity videos: BlackBerry PlayBook and iPad comparison and BlackBerry PlayBook Social Networking. They belong to Matthew, manager of the Browser & Web Platform team at RIM, which is crafting the Web experience for the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet and helped build the BlackBerry® 6 Web browser. Check out my interview with Matthew below to learn more about the surfing the ‘net on a BlackBerry PlayBook tablet!

What type of browsing experience are you trying to deliver on the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet?

We plan to deliver an uncompromised browsing experience that enables the full web on tablet devices. This means it must be standards-compliant and fast. It will have an intuitive and engaging user interface, and support rich content including Adobe® Flash® and HTML5.

We know web developers have strong reasons for choosing development technologies when creating web content. Whether the reasons are technical, aesthetic, tooling support, or simply a matter of coding preference, we want to provide a platform that gives developers choices and allows them to deliver the richest Web experiences for the end user.

We saw in your demo how well Adobe Flash is working on the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet already. What percentage of sites do you think work better with Flash support? What else will the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet be able to do in the future?

A large portion of the top 100 websites use Flash. Most online gaming sites and most online video currently is also driven by Flash. There are a huge number of Flash developers out there on the Web generating great content and we want them to be able to bring that content to the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet. We’ve actually had a developer in-house spending full days playing Adobe Flash games for ‘research’. Lucky guy!

[YouTube link for mobile viewing]

What about HTML5 and CSS3?

Along with Adobe Flash, we support modern web standards like HTML5 audio and video, canvas, app cache, offline storage and CSS3. There is a lot of content on the Web utilizing HTML5 and CSS3. Many of the modern Web frameworks are being built on these technologies and this will lead to even richer sites being developed. We are committed to making sure this content works really well on the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet in the richest way possible. For example, the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet is capable of delivering HD video content through the browser!

We didn’t show it in the videos, but talk to me a bit about the tabbed browsing experience on the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet.

One of the great features of the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet is its ability to truly multitask many applications at the same time. Naturally, we provide the same capabilities in the browser by allowing users to have multiple web sites open at the same time. We can even have multiple tabs open where one tab is playing your favorite songs from an Internet music service while you are browsing a news site or playing a game in another tab. If this is something readers would like to see, we can definitely demonstrate tabbed browsing in a future video (good idea! – Ed.).

How are you guys leveraging your experience with BlackBerry 6 for the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet browser?

Our team has been developing browsers for a long time and we are intimately familiar with the intricacies of making a truly first class product. It is our passion. Speed, memory usage, network utilization, battery life, rendering fidelity, standards compliance, and interaction paradigms are all important considerations when developing a browser. We are pouring all of our expertise in all of these areas into making the browser on the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet the best tablet browser… period.

What do you think the future of the web is going to look like on mobile devices?

I think web engines like WebKit (which powers the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet and BlackBerry 6 browsers) are going to become more and more important. We are going to see much deeper integration into mobile platform APIs and closer ties to device hardware. Browsers will continue to evolve to a point where they are considered an equivalent alternative to native applications for delivering any content to mobile devices. In a lot of cases, I think the end user won’t even know they are using a browser. Good examples of this are the evolution of web-based games, video and productivity apps. These types of applications are becoming more rich and featureful all the time. And, as cloud computing becomes more prevalent, the need for a strong browser on mobile devices increases. All devices need a way to access that content. It’s already amazing to see what people are doing with mobile devices on a daily basis. Just take a look at what people are doing now on the subway during their daily ride to work or at the mall sitting on bench. It’s only going to get better and the browser will play a key role.

[YouTube link for mobile viewing]

What should developers keep in mind when they are building pages to be PlayBook compatible?

The BlackBerry PlayBook tablet browser is very resilient and can handle complex Web content very well. We have some tricks up our sleeve but I am going to save those tips for a little later. Here are some general tips for developers to follow when developing for all tablets.

• Follow Web standards when designing your content.
• Do not use obsolete standards like WML, XHTML-MP.
• Keep in mind tablet interaction mechanisms. Generally, there is no mouse and no hover on tablets as they are usually purely touch-based devices. Design for touch screen interaction. Keep in mind the size of hit targets when designing buttons and other UI, and pay attention to the implementation of touch events and gestures. Each platform handles these events slightly differently.
• Be conscious of the screen size and resolution when developing your content if you are using fixed size elements.
• It’s best to avoid using framesets. On some platforms, frames get flattened out which can be unexpected and changes the layout of the entire page. On other platforms that don’t flatten, frames are difficult to interact with for zooming and scrolling.
• If you want fine-tuned control of your content, you can use meta-tags, like the viewport meta-tag to control layout size and zooming behavior.
• Avoid using popups. They are just annoying.
• Consider how you want your site to look under both landscape and portrait orientations.

We will publish some guidelines with more details on BlackBerry PlayBook tablet-specific development in the future.

Anything else you’d like to tell readers?

We’re really excited to deliver a great browsing experience on the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet and can’t wait to show more. Please post a comment and let us know what you’d like to see in follow up videos.

I know many of you are eager to see more of the BlackBerry® PlayBook™ in action. I’m excited to share the above video with you that we filmed with Matthew from the web browser group here at RIM, which demonstrates how the web browsing experience is coming together on the PlayBook.

On the video, Matthew quickly runs through a series of comparison tests with a PlayBook and iPad (running iOS 3.2.2), which demonstrate three things: the speed of the PlayBook Browser, its support for rich Adobe® Flash® content, and the performance of open web standards like HTML 5 on the PlayBook. Post a comment and let us know what you think!

iPad is a trademark of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries.

You may know that many attendees were surprised during the Adobe MAX keynote when Kevin Lynch of Adobe revealed that the tablet he was using was a BlackBerry PlayBook. You may have also seen RIM Co-CEO Mike Lazaridis joining him soon afterward for a detailed BlackBerry PlayBook app demo.

What many of you might not know is that, owing to the ease-of-development of the BlackBerry Tablet OS and related tools, developers are already writing apps—and quickly. (Keep in mind that the BlackBerry Tablet OS SDK for Adobe AIR has only been out since Monday!) Here’s a quick highlight of what developers are already building for the BlackBerry PlayBook.

Read More at the Inside BlackBerry Developer’s Blog »