We’ll use your existing Microsoft account or connect Outlook with your BlackBerry Z10 using the new Outlook.com service from Microsoft. The reason for doing this is simple as well; these accounts support wireless synchronization with your BlackBerry Z10. Since Outlook makes it easy to manage multiple accounts, you can enjoy the benefits of wireless synchronization with your email provider as well as wireless synchronization of your contacts and calendar.

Read more at the Inside BlackBerry Help Blog »

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.

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!

	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

I’m excited to announce that the BlackBerry® PlayBook™ OS 2.0 software update officially launched worldwide today. In October, I spoke to you about some of the key features you could expect with the release of BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0. Today, I’m proud to tell you – we’ve delivered them.

As you will see, we’ve made updates and enhancements to some of the things you’ve told us you like the most. We’ve also brought you some new, highly anticipated features that you’ll find only on BlackBerry PlayBook tablet. Let me tell you about my favorite BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0 features:

All-New Built-In Functionality

I have to say, the features I’m most excited about with this launch are built-in email, calendar and contacts. Unique to BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0, you can now quickly manage all of your email accounts with a unified inbox, manage your schedule with new features like a People View of your day (which lets you quickly see everyone who is on your agenda for that day), and view your contacts as a social hub that contains information from popular social networks including Facebook®, Twitter®, and LinkedIn®.

Social Integration in Calendar & Contacts

The built in calendar is designed to pull in the information that matters to you from your social networks and make it available where and when you need it. Contact cards are dynamically populated with the latest real-time information from your Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn accounts to create a consolidated view of your contacts most recent updates.

BlackBerry Bridge

Another feature I’m excited for you to try is the new BlackBerry Bridge functionality that allows you to use your BlackBerry smartphone as a remote control for your PlayBook. I’ve used this feature both for presentations in the office, and at home with my PlayBook tablet connected to my television.

	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

Open On

Although it’s hard to choose only four, I will say that Open On definitely makes my list of favorite BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0 features. This convenient functionality allows you to open your documents, photos and links from your BlackBerry smartphone onto your BlackBerry PlayBook tablet with one click. I often use Open On to review documents (PowerPoint, Word, and PDF) that people send me on my BlackBerry smartphone. It’s a great way to combine the convenience of my BlackBerry® Bold™ 9900 and the big screen on my PlayBook tablet.

These are just a few of the reasons I’m excited about today’s launch, and they’re just some of the great features that PlayBook OS 2.0 has to offer. Following the 2012 Consumer Electronics show, we heard a lot of great feedback on PlayBook OS 2.0 with reviews from Team BlackBerry. I’d love to hear what you think now that the software update has officially launched.

This post on the BlackBerry Help blog will provide more information about how to get started with your new PlayBook OS 2.0 update.

- David J. Smith, SVP, Mobile Computing, Research In Motion

More about BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0

1. New Video Chat features with BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0
2. Help Blog: How to download and update to BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0 and manage the new home screen
3. Help Blog: Getting Started with Email, Contacts and Calendar in BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0
4. Help Blog: Getting Started with Video Chat in BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0
5. BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0 Reviews from CES
6. CES 2012: BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0 Communicates [Video]

It’s the end of the week, so that means it’s Five Tip Friday! The focus this week: Five BlackBerry® smartphone shortcuts to help you speed through daily tasks. Some of you might already be using these tips, but for those who aren’t familiar with the following, here are some things you might want to know.

Read more at the Inside BlackBerry Help Blog »

Today we are pleased to announce that Tungle has joined Research In Motion (RIM). We’re excited that the Tungle team is bringing their expertise in cloud-based, cross-platform, calendar management to the BlackBerry platform.

Tungle is a leading provider of cloud-based calendar and scheduling services that makes it easy for users to share their availability and schedule appointments regardless of their choice of desktop, mobile or cloud-based calendar. Tungle connects users on Google, Yahoo!, FaceBook, TripIt, Plancast, Outlook, iCal, LotusNotes, LotusLive, and WindowsLive. If you are not already familiar with them you can find out more about Tungle at http://www.tungle.me/.

BlackBerry is a fantastic solution for connecting users to the people and information that matter most throughout their day. By working with Tungle to add cloud-based, cross-platform calendar capabilities to the BlackBerry platform we can further enrich our customers’ experience with BlackBerry and continue to help them get things done.

– Tom Goguen, VP, Collaboration and Social Networking at Research In Motion (RIM)

One of the questions I get asked frequently is: “How can I wirelessly synchronize my Gmail Calendar and Contacts with my BlackBerry® smartphone?” With a BlackBerry smartphone data plan and BlackBerry® Device Software 5.0 or higher, this simple to do!

The first thing you want to do is make sure you have the right software on your BlackBerry smartphone. To do this, navigate to Options and click About. On the third line down, there will be a number like 5.0 Bundle 1602. This tells you are running BlackBerry Device Software 5.0. If you are using 4.7.1 or lower, you should check to see if there is an upgrade available for your device.

Read more at the Inside BlackBerry Help Blog »