Tag Archives: CES

Consumer Electronics Show

Rogers (Canada)

Rogers introduces first-ever real-time data usage alerts for roaming

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Travel wows

Delayed flights, lost luggage, middle seat, airline goes on strike while you’re on vacation?  These are just a few of the pains people experience when they travel.  I can tell you as a Canadian, that you don’t know travel woes until you travel as a Canadian with your smartphone.  The big three (Rogers, Telus & Bell) have obscene roaming rates.  So when the Kevin, Bla1ze and myself travel to WES/DevCon/BB World with our BlackBerry smartphones we are making a huge sacrifice for you the NHCBBA nation. Rogers charges $6.14/MB in the US, if you think that is bad when our fearless leader travels to Barcelona for Mobile World Congress he is billed the bargain basement rate of $30.00 per megabyte.

The carriers offer packaged bundles for short periods of time to help remove some of the burden of the roaming costs, but who knows how much data is used?  I find when I travel my data use increases with all my Facebook or Twitter photo uploads (can’t let an opportunity to show off what I am eating for dinner) plus all the glorious FourSquare check-ins to earn more and more badges. With these carrier bundles when you’ve exhausted the bucket you go back to pay-per-use.

Rogers however, has introduced some good news.  They have introduced alerts to keep you current on your roaming data usage as well as lower cost travel data passes.  This is a decent start to help ease some of the data roaming pain. Looking forward to see how it helps for DevCon and CES.

More information at Rogers Redboard


via: cb

Blackberry Playbook, Sprint - Nextel - Boost

BlackBerry PlayBook headed to Verizon Wireless?

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Earlier this year at CES 2011, RIM announced that Sprint would be getting a 4G BlackBerry PlayBook. However, no mention was made if Big Red would also get the PlayBook. A website called PlayBookWithoutLimits.com has surfaced, which apparently held registration for beta testing the BlackBerry PlayBook on Verizon Wireless. The pilot program has since been closed, but we contacted the creators of the page, who had this to say:

“Thank you for your interest in the program.  Please note this is an exclusive program for Verizon enterprise customers and participation is by invitation only.”

As with most carriers, their premiere enterprise users get to test devices to see if they’d be interested in purchasing stock for their company. This is definitely a good sign that Verizon & Sprint would be getting a 4G BlackBerry PlayBook may potentially sell a 3G or 4G PlayBook in the future, but it is by no means confirmation. If Big Red does offer the PlayBook, would you pick one up?

via SkatterTech

Blackberry Playbook, PlayBook

PlayBook to Have 4,000 Apps at Launch and Longer Battery Life than iPad

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RIM is slowly letting more and more details out about the PlayBook which is set to launch sometime later this quarter. Reuters got RIM’s Jeff McDowell, senior vice-president for business and platform marketing, to rebuff analysts battery life concerns. According to McDowell “It’s going to be equal or greater than the iPad with smaller battery size.” They also let out that RIM plans on having about 4,000 third party PlayBook apps available at launch which is impressive. It took RIM months to get that many in App World.

 

The other interesting thing McDowell mentioned was confirming that the new BlackBerry Balance work/personal separation program should be available in North America within 2 months. Supposedly carriers are testing it now and it will be released soon. It will be kind of cool to see that become a reality since RIM could make some real headway if they got early adopters to push for newer BlackBerrys like the upcoming rumored devices.

PS: Check out the picture above that I took of the PlayBook at CES. Notice the 1092 hours and 15 minutes before it is fully charged… As RIM said they still had a ways to go with power management.

Blackberry Playbook, Upcoming / Rumored BB

RBC Claims RIM Could Sell 6+ Million PlayBooks in 12 Months

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You have to love analysts. They get to make predictions on the future and (almost) never have to be held accountable for the results. The latest prediction on BlackBerry PlayBook sales comes from RBC Capital Markets (via Financial Post) which has been pretty nice to RIM as Barrist pointed out in the forums. According to RBC RIM could ship upwards of 6 million PlayBooks in the first calendar year after launch. That is a pretty high number considering DigiTimes was saying that RIM plans on shipping 1 million of them in Q1 of 2011 which is almost half way over…

 

RBC’s numbers are from a survey of 1,133 customers after CES with 6% claiming they will “Likely” buy the PlayBook. The analyst, Mike Abramsky, claims that 4 million of those devices will sell in 2011. The other interesting thing that Abramsky noted was that 37% of respondents considered the tethering bridge to BlackBerrys to be “important” whatever that means. He claims the PlayBook will have an average selling price of $450 with 30% of it being gross margins leading up to $1.8 billion in revenue for RIM.

All in all pretty promising but a survey of a thousand people at a gadget show might not exactly be indicative of the whole world. What do you think? Here is my prediction. RIM will sell 10 million PlayBooks in the 12 months after launch. See I am a natural? I got that number by pulling it out of a hat and then performing “Magic” guessing calculations on it.

Utilities

Kodak Releases Wireless Printer – Fails To Release BlackBerry App

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For months we have been hearing about how Kodak is coming out with a printing solution for BlackBerry. They were at CES showing off the solution at the RIM booth. They then proceeded to sue RIM over patent infringement in the next few days. They even managed to get DataViz to update Documents to Go back in March to make it compatible with Kodak’s wireless printing app.

Now SlashGear spotted the fact that Kodak is now selling the ESP Office 6150 AiO printer with wireless printing for the iPhone and BlackBerry. Turns out that the iPhone app is now available but the BlackBerry app is “Coming Soon.” Wonderful!

Now if you feel like shelling out $229.99 on Kodak’s website or $193 on Amazon for a printer that in the future will work from your BlackBerry let us know!

Twitter

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2011-01-23

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Videos

BlackBerry Pros at CES 2011: Lara Spencer interviews Piers Morgan

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The BlackBerry Pros interviews conducted by Laura Spencer were a popular event at CES 2011. We previously showed you the interviews with Adrian Grenier, Olivia Wilde, and Common and here is the fourth installment, Piers Morgan. You may recognize Piers from America’s Got Talent and Britain’s Got Talent or from his appearance on The Celebrity Apprentice. It’s a pretty short interview, but it’s obvious he loves BlackBerry, and is excited about the PlayBook! I like how he throws in “love what you do” towards the end as well. Where have I heard that before?

Video Credit

business apps

Worth Ave Group – A new way to insure your BlackBerry

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We all love our BlackBerry smartphones, but what happens when the unthinkable occurs? What if you drop your prized possession and it breaks into a million pieces? What if you go to set your BlackBerry down in the cupholder in your car, but you realize all too late that there is a cup of coffee there? What do you do when these unfortunate events happen?

Well, you have a few options, but I want to tell you about a new option I just recently learned about at CES.

I met with a company called Worth Ave Group and they explained to me about their cell phone insurance. They have policies starting at $45 per year depending on the coverage amount, and each claim only has a $50 deductible. The nice thing about this insurance as opposed to the policies offered by carriers is that there are unlimited claims during your policy term. Now that is not to say that you can go overboard with claims, but sometimes bad things may happen, and the limited amount of claims typically provided by the carrier insurance may not be enough.

Another nice feature that Worth Ave Group has is laptop insurance. Now you’re probably wondering what this has to do with your BlackBerry, and since you’re wondering, I’ll tell you. If you add a policy for your laptop, you can add a $10 rider on that policy to cover your BlackBerry as well. So if you were thinking about insuring your laptop in the first place, this may be something you want to look into as well for your BlackBerry.

Let me run you through two examples of coverage:

Example 1 – Insurance for a BlackBerry Bold 9780 with a suggested retail price of $449.99 on T-Mobile. The cost for insurance with Worth Ave Group would be $53 per year, or about $4.42 per month, and you’d have a $50 deductible if you made a claim.

Example 2 – Insurance for a laptop valued at $700 and a BlackBerry smartphone. The cost for this policy with Worth Ave Group would be $60 per year, or about $5 per month, and this is also with a $50 deductible.

To me, it makes the most sense to bundle your BlackBerry insurance with your laptop, but either way I think it’s a great value.

Head over to Worth Ave Group‘s website and take a look for yourself. This may just be the policy you were looking for.

BlackBerry Advertisements, Upcoming / Rumored BB, Videos

Leo Laporte shows off a BlackBerry PlayBook on Live! with Regis and Kelly

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Live! with Regis and Kelly had a segment today on some of the best gadgets shown at CES 2011. Leo Laporte brought several devices to talk about, and one was the BlackBerry PlayBook! Although we’re still wondering who he had to wrestle at RIM to get one.

Check out the video above to see the segment. The PlayBook is the first device he talks about and is covered in the first minute of the video. Some of the other gadgets he talks about are pretty cool too so you may want to stick around for the full 7 minutes to see the rest.

Source: Live! With Regis and Kelly

Twitter

Twitter Weekly Updates for 2011-01-16

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