News and new pointers on the software and hardware to make the Blackberry better as a Media device. |
BBTips Blog
BES and Traveler Posts?
Why, on a page about using a Blackberry as a media device, are their instructions for setting up a Blackberry 10 on Domino? Its because the instruction book is missing. At the beginning of January 2013 I had pre-ordered 5 Z10s and I decided to get my environment rolling. First up was Traveler, I had never used Traveler before as my company had used BES since 2003, so I hit the books and read up on it and had it installed and configured (correctly it turns out) within roughly 6 hours. I found 3 guinea pigs in my office to test it, one with an iPhone 4s, one with a Samsung S3 and one with an S2. Everyone worked pretty good. The next day I brought in my Playbook and started installing BDS 6. The instructions were very sparse and all over the place, a diagram of how it worked was also impossible to find and public knowledge was non-existent. It took me a few days of trial and error to get it installed and working on my Playbook. Things that were missing were the mention of the Email address being required in Active Directory, the server address to use (/servlet/traveler) couldn't be found anywhere, I eventually found it when someone provided instruction on connecting a Playbook directly to Traveler, leaving the Domain name blank was also missing. Once January 31st came around and BES 10 was released I had that installed within 20 minutes and running on a Dev Alpha soon after. January 5th rolls around and I'm all set but I soon realize that there are other people in the same boat as I was, maybe not a lot but definitely significant. So up come the instructions, I'm not great at writing instructions but I've had a number of people follow them and get all set. So I hope you are one of them. |
Blackberry 10
I now have a Blackberry 10 device and I've been trying to go through my list of apps that I always need. The instructions on the left will be updated as I get everything figured out. For Audio Books I had tested out a few, there are currently none available in Blackberry World so I looked at side loading options. The best one I've found so far is BeyondPodcast, I tried out Mort Audiobook Player as well but it couldn't figure out the length of the MP3 files. I've updated my findings on the Blackberry as an Audiobook Player Page |
Blackberry Playbook
Recently I purchased a Blackberry Playbook, it took my a while to make the leap as I wanted to try out an Asus eePad Transformer tablet first. I wanted this device to be primarily a web page browser and an ebook reader, both of which it does superbly. I'm an avid user of Kobo and I find the native Kobo reader to be quite good, it also syncs my bookmarks over to my BB Bold 9900 (which is now my 10th Blackberry) so I can do a little reading even when I don't have the Playbook. For novels acquired in different methods I've been using the Reader for ePub and Kindle which cost $0.99 in Appworld and has some good reviews. You could alternatively install Moon+ Reader via side-loading the Android app. The Blackberry Bridge functionality is also way beyond what I imagined and I'm quite happy with it. |
My Review of the BlackBerry Visor Mount Speakerphone VM-605
I've had this device for just over 2 weeks now and quite enjoying it. I find it puts out a strong signal and the audio quality is quite good. The scanning for an open FM signal is very handy and the FM Radio Data System that shows the incoming caller is handy. The one issue I've run into is that it will turn off the FM transmitter when not in use, which means if you want a phone call's voice to come out over the radio you'll need to hit the FM button first on the Visor. |
Blackberry Outage
The outage has come and gone, my BIS came back around 1:00am but at Noon on the 13th my BES was still down. I found that the BB Dispatcher services had locked up. I forced closed it, restarted the service and then restarted the router service and everything came back up. In other news I'm now sporting a Blackberry Bold Touch 9900, its my 9th Blackberry, and I don't think I've liked a Blackberry this much since I got the Curve a few years back. The keyboard is perfect and the touch screen is great. My only issue is when web browsing if you are trying to scroll up the page with the trackpad you are very likely to touch the screen putting the cursor back to the bottom of the page. |
Playbook media thoughts
I've been demoing the Playbook for the last 2 weeks now and I'm quite enjoying it. For eBook reading a recomend skipping the Kobo eReader unless you excusivley purchase Kobo eBooks, what I've used instead is a program called EPUB Reader and it works great, it does only work with non-DRM epubs but I'm sure this will be remedied in future versions. The Podcast and Media players are very similar to the ones on the handhelds, no real difference at all. One thing that is missing is a library synchronization between the two devices, I understand that this kind of feature has been removed by design but I believe that there should be settings to allow it. Currently your only option is to sync both devices with your computer. Next up is the wait for the Android software, looking forward to this. |
Blackberry Bold 9900 and Handeld QNX
Originally planned for August the touch based Blackberry Bold been pushed back to September, and it also looks like the QNX based operating system for Handhelds has also been pushed back.1 With a OS7 and 7.5 in the works the QNX rollout may take quite a while to happen hopefully we won't need to wait until the QNX OS for Android app support though. 1BGR |
First Blog Post
I've now added in a Blog to the site, I'll be posting news about all thats going on with Media and the Blackberry, whether it be Hardware, Software or new OS Upgrades to improve the Blackberry, I'll try very hard not to rip off anyone else's content, except maybe RIM's own press releases. |
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