blackberry
RIM announces BBM Music
Remember a few days ago we reported that there was word that RIM was interested in launching their own music service? Well it’s official as they have just announced their BBM Music, which unfortunately not available to general public yet, although it’s expected to see a launch by the end of the year. Some of the features of BBM Music include:
- Build a personal music profile with 50 of your favorite songs. You can refresh your profile by swapping out up to 25 songs each month.
- Invite your BBM friends to subscribe to BBM Music and to join your BBM Music Community.
- With each friend that is added to BBM Music, you grow your music collection since the songs from the profile of each BBM Music friend are available to you at any time.
- Up to 50 tracks from your personal profile are shared with your BBM Music Community, and each member of your community shares up to 50 songs from their profile with you.
- Enjoy a truly social community-based music experience – the more friends who join your community, the more songs you can listen to.
- Easily discover music that your BBM Music friends are listening to, and comment on your friends’ songs and playlists.
- You can create multiple playlists from music in your profile as well as all of your friends’ profiles, and with one click you can shuffle the entire collection of music from your BBM Music Community. You can even see which friend contributed each song while it plays.
- Within your BBM Music app, you also see a visual timeline that shows the recent updates of all users within your community. It gives you a chronological view of community updates, including who added new friends, which songs were added or removed, which playlists were created and what comments were made by your BBM Music friends.
I guess it was true what they said about the 50 track limit, but I guess it’s good that they allow you to keep swapping out 25 tracks a month. Previous speculation had it priced at $10 a month, but it turns out that it will only cost $4.99, which isn’t too bad and is a cheaper and legal way to share music among your friends. Any Blackberry owners out there excited by this?
Back in the day, it was anathema to think that Apple computers would run on Intel processors, and Apple machines would have Microsoft Office running on them. Well, those days have long since arrived and gone, and it looks like to hear of a BlackBerry device running on Android? Now that’s what is going to happen with the BlackBerry Priv, where the folks over at Vietnam-based Karalux have something special up their sleeves for this handset, that is, by offering a gold-plating service.
It is going to be more challenging than usual though, as Karalux shared, “Unlike the previous generations, it is a little bit more difficult to disassemble BlackBerry Priv. Karalux engineers took nearly 2 hours to ‘operate’ its details, and spent 4 more hours with more than 10 different procedures to complete the first gold-plated BlackBerry Priv in Vietnam.”
The handset and gold-plating will cost $1,111 thereabouts, whereas international customers will have to fork out more at approximately $1,350 to bring one of these puppies back home. [Press Release]
It looks like BlackBerry has not decided to call it quits just yet where the smartphone market is concerned, and this time around, their unannounced smartphone has been given the codename BlackBerry Venice. What makes the BlackBerry Venice special is the fact that this could very well be one of BlackBerry’s very first devices that will run on the Android mobile operating system.
In recent times, we have heard that the BlackBerry Venice ought to be made available some time down the road over at AT&T. Apparently, @evleaks claims that this new handset, too, will be sold by T-Mobile, although there is no exact word on availability.
Whispers on the street point to the BlackBerry Venice arriving later this November. I guess all that we can do now is to sit tight and wait.
[MWC 2015] BlackBerry might not be the tour de force that it once was in the world of smartphones, but this does not mean that the company is a pushover, either. We have learned that this particular edition of Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, has seen a new BlackBerry device introduced – the all new BlackBerry Leap smartphone for 4G LTE networks. Touted to be an affordable all-touch smartphone that is housed in a modern and powerful design, it will specially target career builders as well as companies who value both security and privacy when bringing productivity to a whole new level.
Hardware and software specifications include a 5” edge-to-edge HD display, a 2,800mAh battery life, BlackBerry OS 10.3.1, a best-in-class BlackBerry keyboard, BlackBerry Blend, BlackBerry Assistant, dual app storefronts that come preloaded for access to a huge selection of apps for work and play (BlackBerry World and Amazon Appstore), among others. [Press Release]