Earlier today the RIM’s tablet, the BlackBerry PlayBook, was updated to OS 1.0.7. It’s not quite as significant as the last update, but there are a few new features, mostly surrounding file attachments. Now files can be saved to your BlackBerry smartphone over Bridge in addition to locally on the tablet. The PlayBook can also read ZIP files, which is great for folks who regularly deal with batches of compressed files as e-mail attachments.There are a few other minor changes, like portrait orientation in the pictures app, pinching to zoom in videos, and a new airplane mode option. There’s also a whole range of new languages supported, ranging from Russian to Bahasa Indonesian.
Saving files to your phone over Bluetooth is nice and all, but third-party file explorers have been offering the ability for a little while now. The ZIP file support is limited to stuff received over Bridge, and doesn’t work for files downloaded through the browser. Zooming in on videos is a neat trick, but only really useful for when you want to pause and pick out a particular detail. What PlayBook owners are really looking for are core applications like calendar, e-mail, memopad, and contacts that don’t require you to be paired up with a BlackBerry smartphone. There’s a bunch of reasons why RIM had implemented Bridge in the first place, but the bottom line is that the missing features resulted in a poor public reception. RIM had promised that stand-alone applications would become available, but we’ve blown by their projected timeframe likely because the native PIM apps were set to kick off with the now-delayed HSPA and LTE-enabled PlayBooks.
In any case, if you’re a PlayBook owner and haven’t received an update notification yet, hit the menu button in the top right, and browser over to the Software Updates tab. If nothing shows up after tapping “Check for Updates”, give your device a reboot.
[via IBB]