We can’t think of anyone that couldn’t use a personal assistant helping keep track of emails and contacts. It’s too bad a living, breathing personal assistant just isn’t feasible for everyone. That’s where Xobni comes in. Xobni is a super-charged, super-smart address book for your BlackBerry (NSDQ: RIMM). The Xobni for BlackBerry app trawls through your emails and automatically creates contacts for anyone you’ve ever interacted with and assigns a Xobni Rank to each contact, based on your previous email interactions with that person.
We mentioned Xobni previously, but today we had the pleasure of sitting down with Xobni CEO Jeff Bonforte to see for ourselves how Xobni can help manage all your emails and contacts in an intuitive app. The app displays email interaction history for each contact, so you’ll never have to wonder what you last discussed with a particular contact. Xobni even integrates into your email and phone apps, allowing you to pull up the Xobni address book with a flick of the trackball/trackpad.
Check out our hands-on video for a better idea of how Xobni works!
It’s not often that a mobile app for the BlackBerry (NSDQ: RIMM) platform out-plays its iPhone counterpart. But, when it happens, you can be sure it’s going to grab some headlines. Location aware friend-tracker Loopt is grabbing just those kinds of headlines today with a new update that enables background processing and things-to-do suggestions in the BlackBerry app. Loopt for BlackBerry will keep track of your friends even when you’re not actively using the app. In comparison, the iPhone version of the Loopt app, which could be considered the social network’s premier mobile app, doesn’t support background processing (and probably won’t for a good while). Take that, iPhone.
Loopts location-based social network is great for keeping tabs on your friends, but it basically becomes useless when you exit the app on your smartphone. Once the app closes, you’re cut off from your friends’ location updates until you fire up the Loopt app again. This new BlackBerry Loopt app update finally makes it possible to track your friends in real-time and in the background. If your buddy changes locations while you’re sending out an email or making a phone call, Loopt will take note and update its location database.
The update also sports the new Pulse suggestions feature that automatically recommends events and places that might pique your interest. It’ll also give you a quick glance at what your friends are doing at any given moment. And, with coupon support, the latest Loopt for BlackBerry update can automatically determine your location and serve up relevant coupons and discount offers from nearby businesses.
In the end, it all comes back to the fact that the Loopt for BlackBerry now supports background processing, and the iPhone does not. We’re hesitant to admit it, but the iPhone could learn a thing or two from BlackBerry.
Loopt for BlackBerry is free of charge. Get it here.
RIM today announced at their BlackBerry Developers Conference in San Francisco that the BlackBerry (NSDQ: RIMM) OS will soon support OpenGL ES for 3D graphics acceleration. The arrival of 3D graphics support should finally bring the BlackBerry platform out of the dark ages, where BrickBreaker and other 2D games reigned supreme. RIM and EA Mobile took to the BBDC keynote stage to show off the still-in-development “Need For Speed: Shift” 3D game, giving the world a glimpse of what’s to come. The game looked impressive, to say the least, so we figured a hands-on video was in order.
We sat down with EA Mobile and gave the game a solid once-over. Before we continue, we should mention again that Need For Speed: Shift is still in early stage development, and what you see below is actually the first ever playable version of the game. As such, there weren’t too many cars to pick from, and the game had only a single playable track. Still, the accelerometer-based controls were easy to use – they were responsive but not twitchy (like a lot of racing games on the iPhone). In-game audio was impressive and really gave the game a more polished feel than the two weeks worth of development time would have suggested.
EA Mobile promises to have Need for Speed: Shift polished off by the time it hits the BlackBerry App World. By that time the game should support more computer rivals (AI enemies), a drift-turn feature to slide around corners and player-points to upgrade your ride. Check out the video below!
Gaming on BlackBerry (NSDQ: RIMM) has never been what you would call breathtaking – a few low-key casual games here and there and the preloaded Brickbreaker could handle the lion’s share of twitchy boredom. Well, the platform is taking a big jump as OpenGL ES support has gone official and is currently available in the beta BlackBerry JDE we had mentioned earlier.
The in-app purchacing sounded vaguely iPhone OS 3.0, and OpenGL even moreso, but between these multimedia improvements and BlackBerry’s existing expertise in productivity, the whole platform is feeling a lot more balanced. Shown here is Need for Speed, which we’ll have some hands-on footage of shortly, complete with gesture controls for brake and boosting, and accelerometer use for steering. There’s going to be at least one other big name game showing off what OpenGL on BlackBerry can do, and we’ll be sure to check it out.
More goodies from the BlackBerry (NSDQ: RIMM) Developer Conference today: fresh location-detection options using cell site recognition, and push services for those who want to leverage RIM’s biggest advantage in mobile computing. First up, cell site recognition is a big one for location-based apps who want to keep battery drain down (GPS takes a significant toll). Anyone with 5.0 will automatically update the database of cell towers and their locations; a very cool use of crowdsourcing. There’s also new reverse geocoding that will tag specific coordinates with a proper street address – a nice addition that we’re already seeing in action in Google (NSDQ: GOOG) Maps for Mobile. On top of those two, RIM has introduced an API for estimated travel time within the U.S. and Canada; the time is generated based on aggregated traffic conditions and speed limits cross-referenced with distance.
Good stuff all around, but push services are probably bigger news for most developers. Push Services will enable apps to pull down up to 8 KB of data with all of the righteous immediacy that makes BlackBerry e-mail oh-so-very awesome. It’ll be interesting to see how this service will fare once it’s out in the wild and what developers use it for (push Twitter, anyone?); Web Signals have been testing the waters for a little bit with Alliance Members, but we’ll have to wait to see how much apps can really do with 8 KB. An added bonus, for devs who thought they might have to pay for it, is that Push Services will be available for free.
Both the new geolocation and push services are available specifically in devices with OS 5.0 and up, and will be available in the first half of 2010. You can try out some of these new options in the beta 5 Java Development Environment that was just released today. For more information on the upcoming push service, check out RIM’s page.
One of the many announcements made at the BlackBerry (NSDQ: RIMM) Developer Conference is a new ad partner program that allows app creators to monetize their apps right away. The BlackBery Advertising Service will plug in ads from Jumptap, Lat49, Millennial Media, Navteq, 1020 Placecast, Quattro Wireless and Sympatico.ca – an impressive initial list, but I’m wondering where Google Mobile ads stand, and if their own program stands on its own just fine for BlackBerry devs. Ads offered through this program can do all sorts of stuff, like click-to-call, launching the address book or browser, or find a program in App World.
A related update on the transaction front are in-app purchases. That means you can buy new levels for a game you’re really digging, or buy songs from on-device music stores (7digital comes to mind), and similar kinds of microtransactions. Yeah, it sounds suspiciously familiar to the iPhone 3.0 announcement, but it offers BlackBerry developers some added flexibility in how they make their money.
The new ad service and in-app purchacing goes live in 2010, complete with SDKs. Keep an eye on the newly redesigned Developer Zone for more info.
Ever wanted to go to school and learn about BlackBerrys all day long? Well, two bits of news for you: one, you’re crazy. Two, RIM is officially offering curriculum to academic institutions under app development, support, and administration branches. This can help you provide students the knowledge they need to achieve those dreams of making the killer app, ruling a BlackBerry (NSDQ: RIMM) rollout with an iron fist, or manning a soul-draining tech support cubicle. Instructors can use the textbooks, labs, and materials to teach the courses in whole semesters, or piecemeal as modules in other courses.
This is a really interesting strategy on RIM’s part, and reminiscent of their past efforts in certification programs. Plugging into legitimate educational institutes ensures that the hard skills necessary to maintain RIM’s infrastructure in the big wide world don’t die, and young tech professionals recognise the platform as a valid and real path to make a living. I’m interested in seeing the quality of graduates versus other IT professionals who have fallen into BlackBerry after finishing nonspecific courses…
For more information, hit up www.blackberry.com/academic, and be sure to stay tuned over the coming week for more information from the 2009 BlackBerry Developer Conference.
While Adobe might be taking potshots at Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) for not providing the footholds to get Flash on the iPhone, RIM has announced that upcoming versions of Creative Suite 5 will allow developers to import Flash content in a BlackBerry (NSDQ: RIMM)-friendly format through the Eclipse JDE plug-in. So, yeah, Flash on BlackBerry. We had heard this was coming, and it’s great to see something good and official, though we’ll only really understand the scope of this announcement once we see developers do something with it (similar to the Google (NSDQ: GOOG) Gears and widget support in OS 5.0).
Adobe’s participation extends to all of their popular tools, like Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Illustrator at first, Fireworks, and plenty of other popular apps already being used by web developers will be available later; AIR is in the works. This all elaborates on the Open Screen Project Adobe was talking about not too long ago, and has the potential to make the BlackBerry experience a heck of a lot more enjoyable. Flash-enabled widgets are a great weapon against Android and webOS who have had the benefit of creating a smooth user interface from the ground up; RIM is shackled to their old OS, and as we all know, it’s hard to teach an old dog new tricks. Well, BlackBerry, prove us wrong – let’s see some new tricks.
Creative Suite 5 should be coming out in 2010, along with all of this BlackBerry support, but you can find more details on RIM’s Adobe tools here. Stick around for more announcements and news from the BlackBerry Developer Conference!
We’ve all been there. It’s 3 in the morning and you’re chatting up a beautiful university student who has had way too many shots. She grabs your arm and looks deep into your eyes, channeling a Freudian lust for the love that her father never gave her growing up. She asks to go home with you. Now, you can’t say yes since you’re married and have two beautiful children, but the allure of being balls deep inside a woman half your age is too resisting to pass. You may never have this opportunity again, your wife stopped performing fellatio last decade, and besides, you need the confidence boost by convincing yourself that doing this will make you a man again. Morally grounded men might pull out their iPhone and call the a taxi for this sweet young lady. Some will use the large, multitouch screen to zoom in on their children’s faces as a reminder of what’s waiting for them back home. You’re not one of those men. You’re going to use your iPhone to find the nearest Hilton Hotel, navigate to it, place it on the night stand, and then reach for it once again once when she is in the reverse cowgirl position so you can snap a quick video so you’ll never forget that one night you kicked ass.
The good news: Shazam, the popular music service that allows you to identify a song by holding your device up to a speaker for a few seconds, has released a premium version of their iPhone application called “Shazam Encore” [iTunes link]. For 5 USD (or 4 EUR or 3 GBP) you get: faster song recognition, the ability to see where you where when you identified a song, music recommendations based on the songs you looked up, find out which songs are being identified the most, and a car mode that helps you identify what’s playing on the radio.
“Since our launch on the App Store, Shazam has achieved a huge following with iPhone and iPod touch users and is now one of the most popular music apps in the world,” said Andrew Fisher, CEO of Shazam. “We have listened to our iPhone and iPod touch users and have created a new app which answers their requests to take them on an enhanced music journey that will change the way music lovers experience and learn about music.”
The bad news: New users of Shazam deciding to use the free verison will be limited to only 5 uses of the Shazam service per month.
It’s not often that a mobile app for the BlackBerry (
More goodies from the BlackBerry (
Ever wanted to go to school and learn about BlackBerrys all day long? Well, two bits of news for you: one, you’re crazy. Two, RIM is officially offering curriculum to academic institutions under app development, support, and administration branches. This can help you provide students the knowledge they need to achieve those dreams of making the killer app, ruling a BlackBerry (
