Back in July we got a sneak peak at the BIS 4.1 feature set from N4BB along with tentative rollout dates for Asia Pacific on Sept 10th, Europe on Sept 23rd, and North America on October 8th. We just confirmation from one of our sources that these dates have not changed except for North America getting slightly pushed off to October 10th, 2011 which is oddly a Monday. Sadly there is no word about the different PlayBook interface system hinted in the last leak. The official change log for the rollout is below:
Product Overview
BlackBerry® Internet Service Email 4.1 (BIS-E 4.1) represents the latest service update to RIM’s retail email offering targeted at the Prosumer segment. BIS-E 4.1 introduces Message Improvements, Inbox Priming, BIS Account Management Updates, Carrier Admin Reporting, and additional language support.
We know that native email is coming to the BlackBerry PlayBook soon but its nice to see more signs pointing in that direction. After writing up yesterday about the leaked BIS 4.1 feature set I noticed the last slide mentioned something interesting as a “User Interface Change.” In it RIM says they have updated the BIS login page and setup page to “advise user(s) that BlackBerry tablet setup in not supported when using these interfaces.”
Which begs the question of where and how it will be supported…
Wow BIS is finally getting a significant feature bump with v4.1. The team at N4BB managed to score slides detailing all of the features coming in BIS 4.1 along with rollout dates. Some of the features are also BlackBerry OS 7.0 specific which should be launching around the same time. According to their sources BIS 4.1 will be rolling out to Asia Pacific on Sept 10th, Europe on Sept 23rd, and North America on October 8th.
I am really excited about the new features including my favorite which is email inbox priming. That is a feature that has been available on BES servers for awhile giving you access to your last chunk of emails. With BIS 4.1 it will preload the most recent 20 emails so you will have conversations on your device preloaded. There are loads of other goodies including better account management and message improvements for OS 7.0 so check them out in the slides!
Night Hawk Computers Blackberry Alliance 