Editorial

How I use my BlackBerry PlayBook on a daily basis

This article is aimed at those who don’t currently own PlayBook and how I (a seventeen year old college student) uses his PlayBook in a daily situation.

Okay first, I’ll talk about how I use my PlayBook on a day when I’m at college; I’ll admit I use it less on one of these days as a day I don’t go to college. I’ll usually begin the day by checking my emails and Facebook and Twitter mentions all from my PlayBook. I do this with the new PIM Messages application for the emailing side of things. There is an Official Facebook application that I use to check any notifications that I may have received. Blaq is the Twitter application of my choice as it sends push notifications when open and is live and in general just feels and looks like the most Twitter application on the PlayBook.

Christmas Gadgets

As it’s Boxing Day and like half the world I’ll be spending time with the family I thought I would kick off a post that maybe (hopefully) leads to a little feedback from readers.

What did you get for Christmas?

Leading up to Christmas I had dozens of emails from readers looking for advice on which new mobile to buy for a loved-one or even for themselves. I expect the mobile networks would have been inundated with news connections yesterday!

So if you’re one of those people that picked up a new mobile for xmas, what did you get? Happy with your gift/purchase? The first 24 hours with a new gadget are always the most ‘interesting’! 🙂

No new mobiles tracyandmatt household this year. Tracy bought me a new coffee machine and, as a really unusual gift, shares in the Disney Corporation. Tracy got a new keyboard for her iMac and some new Wii games but we’ve been rather devoid of gadgets this year. We need to share in your gadget euphoria!

Posted by: Matt

Merry Christmas from the tracyandmatt team

It doesn’t seem five minutes since last Christmas but here we are again, another year older!

I just wanted to take the opportunity to say Merry Christmas to you all and a big thanks for visiting the site daily or watching our videos on YouTube. It means the world to us.

Also a big thanks to all the UK networks and device manufactures that supply us with all the phones for review, and not forgetting Clove Technology and The Smartphone Centre who we work closely with and who do a sterling job.

We also couldn’t do it without our dedicated team, who all do the reviews for the love of it, so big love to Vince, Patrick, Chris, Luke and Gareth. (And Matt I suppose!)

So have a great Christmas day and all the best for the New Year.

Posted by: James

A Competitive Tablet Marketplace?

The emerging tablet market is dominated by Apple to such a degree that some experts have worried about anti-trust legislation as iPad sales far outstrip competitors. Some have sued over patent infringement but the core of the matter is that the Apple iPad 2 is the most well-developed product on the market and also dominates with the number and range of apps available. This has certainly helped the corporate giant make tablets mainstream, yet competition is ultimately good for the consumer. Thankfully, Apple’s dominance may be starting to fade as numbers show that more people are picking up Android tablets. In the third quarter of 2011, 26.9% of tablets shipped ran Android’s OS.  The new Kindle Fire is also aiming to capture some of this market.

Android devices have by no means overtaken Apple, yet it is good news to see that Google is putting up a fight. In the next few quarters we may see competitors such as RIM and Samsung begin to gain steam in this market. This will ultimately spur competition, lower prices and lead to better products. Tablets offer a lot of promise, but they are a fairly new concept and there is still a lot of work to be done.

If we look at the recent iPhone update we can see many examples of ideas pioneered by other companies that Apple have adopted and integrated into their iOS. Hopefully, a similar process will follow with iPads where competitors arise and force the creation of even better iPads, as well as host of alternatives for non-Apple lovers.

Posted by: Matt

Twitter does it differently

Ever since Google+ emerged, commentators have been trying to work out who is competing with who in the realtime social world. For my money Facebook and Google+ are locking antlers in the identity/ social fight while Twitter has one eye on both in it’s rear view mirror as it happily gets on with developing the news/ information space.

On both Facebook and Google+ it really matters that you are who you say you are. Real identities are at the core of how both companies are monetising or plan to monetise us. Facebook and Google have set themselves up as the arbiters of identity. Twitter on the other hand couldn’t care less who we are. After all, as I’ve always said and, as Kevin Thau Twitter VP for corporate and business development said the other day: "Twitter is for news. Twitter is for content. Twitter is for information." It’s not for ‘socialising’.

Of course both Facebook and Google+ update in realtime like Twitter, and Facebook’s new Ticker is effectively Facebook’s own Twitter but so what? The whole web is going realtime.

Amazon is doing an Apple

Jeff Bezos is smart. He’s no Steve Jobs but who is? However, Amazon’s Kindle strategy has, and continues to, successfully ape what Apple did with its first iPod and iTunes.

Apple decided to focus on selling people on music. Initially their own music on CDs and then ultimately through the iTunes store. They released a low specification but simple way to listen to your music on the go. Nothing more. They iterated and evolved this one basic thing – portable music – into the Apple behemoth we have today.

Amazon are repeating the idea but they started in reverse with their core strength – selling books. They made a basic ebook reader to serve those books and have been iterating on that simple idea ever since.

Classic games to play on the latest handheld devices

If the intense competition surrounding the development and production of online games has proved they are something worth creating, then the popularity of the most-played games and the financial rewards that come with them will inspire many software writers and programmers.
Currently, much of the focus is on games for the small screen. First came the Nintendo DS and Sony’s PSP. Both however, were rapidly put into the shade with the development, in particular, of the iPhone and the rise of the app.

What’s more, the depth of the online gaming and downloadable app market means there’s something for everyone. With that in mind, here’s a small sample of the best games available for the three biggest online gaming demographics:

BlackBerry helping the UK Police fight crime on our streets

With the recent riots taking place across the UK, Research in Motion have been getting some pretty negative press due to rioters using BlackBerry Messenger as one form of communication. With the BlackBerry being so popular these days of course BBM will be used, but it will not have been the only form of communication for these thugs. If the BlackBerry didn’t have such a huge market share in the UK then other applications would have got the publicity.

But this article isn’t about that. What interests me is that although the Police are getting stick from members of the press, it is the Police themselves that are using the BlackBerry solution to make policing the streets more efficient.

Several UK Police Forces now use the BlackBerry solution routinely and others are currently trialing it.

As you can see below it is not only specific Police applications that are in use by our Police. They too are jumping on the social networking band wagon.

BlackBerry 9780 email update issues?

A few days ago I was setting up a new email address on my BlackBerry 9780 so went in to the setup menu on the phone and in to the Email Account Setup application. My 9780 went off to check for updates and came back with an available download taking me from version 6.0 to 6.11.0419.0755. I downloaded the update which installed and ran the email setup adding my new account. So far so good.

However, a little while later I did a battery swap on the phone and so rebooted the 9780. Waiting patiently for the phone to restart, we all know BlackBerry’s take a while from a cold boot, I waited 5 minutes, then 10 and then another 10 etc. The phone simply failed to boot.

This forced me to connect the 9780 to my PC and reinstall the OS from scratch. This is annoying but not a massive problem as I’m pretty good at taking a full backup of the phone quite frequently. About an hour later I was back to square one, phone was working but minus the new email account. Back in to settings, email account setup and I’m offered the email update once again. This time I said NO to the update. But having done that you cant then setup the new email account. Annoying!

I figure I’ll give it another go, maybe something went wrong the first time. Download and install the update and reboot again. The 9780 once again refuses to boot and it back to an OS restore.

At this point I’m giving up on adding the new email account, I’m pretty annoyed but put it down to the update perhaps net being fully compatible with my Vodafone PAYG BlackBerry.

Unbeknown to me on Thursday Tracy gets presented with the offer of the update on her SIM-free (unlocked) 9780. She downloads and reboots then finds that her phone gets stuck in a Application Error 603 loop and fails to boot also requiring a full OS restore to get it back to normal.

James too attempts the update last night on his 9780 which is SIM-free and also gets the non-booting problem.

SO the purpose of this post, not to set everyone in to a blind panic but to caution you in respect of this update (see the screen shot above) and also to remind you that when you download any software/firmware update on any device it’s a REALLY good idea to make sure you’ve back everything up. With the BlackBerry I’d suggest connecting to the BlackBerry Desktop software and running a full backup and maybe also installing BlackBerry Protect (which is free) on the phone itself.

Any of you out there experienced this same issues? If yes OR know please tell us which version you are going from/to and what network the phone is on etc. Anything that will help RIM find the issue, we’ve already raised it with our contact there.

DON’T PANIC, just be careful!

Posted by: Matt

Todays WP7 Event: My Thoughts

We posted earlier the press release from Microsoft detailing some of the highlights of the Windows Phone 7 ‘Mango’ update that is due out later this year. I wasn’t able to attend myself so I sent our man Phil along to see what Microsoft have up their sleeves. Phil has recently started developing for WP7 so he seemed the perfect person to attend the event.

Many have said that todays new features should have been included in the OS from day one and I tend to agree with them. However, what’s done is done and we must look to the future.

Below are the key points Phil picked up on and also his own thoughts on today’s ‘Mango’ announcement.