The BlackBerry PlayBook launched with the rather irksome “feature” that required a BlackBerry smartphone to be paired over Bluetooth to get core apps like e-mail, contacts, memos, and tasks. RIM has been promising that stand-alone versions would be available, and today at their big conference, they showed e-mail and contacts running fine without a Bluetooth connection. We’re told that tasks and all of the other apps would also be made available this summer.
This is great news for consumers that weren’t as bothered by the need for security of personal data as enterprise IT admins, and combined with Balance, I’m sure even enterprise users will be able to get their personal e-mail and contacts saved locally. There are a lot of reasons why RIM even bothered implementing Bridge in the first place, but that’s another subject altogether.
I trust RIM will eventually open up Bridge to third-party developers, seeing as there’s a lot to be gained from a consistent experience across phone and tablet apps. With Bridge, established smartphone developers could make use of the PlayBook’s impressive 7-inch 1024 x 600 screen, 1 GHz dual-core processor, 1 GB of RAM, and excellent stereo speakers. To see just what the PlayBook’s capable of, Bridge limitations aside, check out my review.
There’s lots going on over here at BlackBerry World, so stick around!