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BlackBerry Bold 9700: Why It’s RIM’s Best BlackBerry Ever
RIM’s latest smartphone, the BlackBerry Bold 9700, is now available in the United States from both T-Mobile and AT&T. CIO.com’s BlackBerry guru Al Sacco explains why the Bold 9700 is the best RIM smartphone ever (think: battery life) despite minor drawbacks (think: on-device storage.)

Good news to me since I just purchased one Friday at T-Mobile and switched my plan to lower unlimited rate with NO CONTRACT!

November 23, 2009 — CIO — BlackBerry enthusiasts, “CrackBerry” addicts and gadget-heads in the United States can now officially purchase Research In Motion’s (RIM) latest and greatest smartphone: the BlackBerry Bold 9700. I’ve used many BlackBerrys in my day, but this is almost my dream smartphone…almost.

T-Mobile became the first U.S. carrier to offer RIM’s new Bold smartphone when it listed the device for sale last Monday for $199.99 with a new, qualifying two-year wireless service contract. AT&T quickly followed suit, releasing its own version of the Bold 9700 to the masses a week later for the same exact price and contract commitment–after a mail-in rebate.

I’ve been using the T-Mobile BlackBerry Bold 9700 for a few weeks now, and I’m nothing short of infatuated with the smartphone. It has nearly everything I want in a high-end device. It’s reasonably priced–the original BlackBerry Bold, the Bold 9000, was more expensive upon release more than a year ago and still sells for $199.99 on contract. And the 9700′s just plain ol’ good-lookin’.

Here are nine reasons, in reverse order, why the new BlackBerry Bold 9700 is RIM’s best BlackBerry ever. If you’re considering a BlackBerry upgrade or are thinking of taking the plunge into the world of BlackBerry for the first time, I strongly suggest you keep these points in mind when checking out the Bold 9700.

Still, you’ll find a few minor shortcomings. None of them are deal-breakers in my opinion–I wouldn’t be naming the Bold 9700 RIM’s best BlackBerry ever if they were—but the points are worth noting, nonetheless.

Hit that jump for specifics. And you can check out a full BlackBerry Bold 9700 unboxing here.

DiVitas’s Mobile UC Now Available on the Latest Devices
November 2, 2009
By Ted Stevenson

Since mobile unified communications became a reality in earnest, two to two-and-a-half years ago, the number of dual mode handsets supported by any given provider’s technology has been a big bone of contention—or, more accurately, promotion. (‘We support 437 handsets; we’re better’—you get the idea.)

Mountain View, Calif.-based DiVitas Networks today made an announcement that pretty much sews up that competition for good (or perhaps makes it irrelevant going forward).

The flashy way to state what they’ve done would be something along the lines of: ‘DiVitas’s technology now works with the iPhone, BlackBerry, and Android phone—not to mention the desktop PC.’ While those are the big attention-getters, in reality what they’ve done is to make their technology compatible with any device that runs a Web browser—a number that’s growing every day.

According to CEO Vivek Khuller, the market reality that set the company on the development path that ended with today’s announcement was the overwhelming predominance of what they are calling “Bring Your Own” phones.

“We [started with] the notion that the mobile devices would be bought by the enterprise and distributed to the employees,” Khuller told EnterpriseVoIPplanet. “The reality is that people pick their own phones. People pick their own plans, their own carriers.

“So for people like us, who are in the business of writing enterprise mobile applications, if we cannot put our applications on this wide variety of phones, we really lose the ability to drive true gains within the enterprise,” Khuller said.

This clearly called for a new approach: Rather than negotiating with owners of ‘closed,’ proprietary operating systems in order to gain the access necessary to write native applications for more devices, why not build a way to accomplish the same end using a piece of open technology that’s already on the device?

That is exactly what DiVitas has done.

“This is the approach we are taking to mobilizing the suite of enterprise applications that we’re focused on,” Khuller elaborated “—mobilizing the desk phone, corporate IM, and social apps like status and presence and location and network—and tying it all together in a single client and making that available on a phone that could be any phone that’s bought by an individual.”

Not only does this vastly enlarge the potential market universe that DiVitas can address (nice for them), it make the benefits of mobile unified communication (cost savings and enhanced communications efficiency), available to many kinds of organizations that would be unable (or simply unwilling) to try to impose on their end users the kind device uniformity that would have been required heretofore.

“If you want to distribute a client through a large population—say a student body at a school—and there are 10,000 or 20,000 students, and each student had a different device from a different service provider, it becomes a very difficult problem for the school,” Khuller observed by way of example. “But if you can make it Web enabled, it doesn’t matter which carrier or which phone these guys are using, as long as they have a Web browser on the device.”

Not only are enormous deployment hurdles swept away, participation quickly becomes essentially universal. And, of even greater importance from the IT department’s perspective, they’re fully in control of the technology—with little or no device management to attend to.

“The biggest problem we solve for the customer is not only giving them the application mobility around voice and social apps, but more importantly, delivering this functionality in a way that it can be sustained both by corporate IT or the service provider.” Khuller pointed out. “Since the application is Web driven, the amount of device management an enterprise would have to do is minimized; everything is managed at the server, so there is nothing to download or upgrade—or manage on an ongoing basis.”

Ron Hutchins, CTO of Georgia Institute of Technology, agrees. “Universities constitute one of the most diverse handset ecosystems, where IT has minimal control over selection of handsets or carriers by students,” he said. “With support for iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry, DiVitas would be able to offer handset and carrier choice that would be very appealing in a college campus environment.”

Also because it is server based, the DiVitas Web interface can be easily customized. Colors and logos can be easily changed, for example. Moreover, custom applications can be integrated into the interface by means of the DiVitas API (DAPI).

Khuller cited a hypothetical example of an international financial organization customizing the DiVitas Web client with its logo other elements and creating a communications portal they could roll out to their employees, worldwide. “It doesn’t matter which phones these guys are using. As long as they have a Web browser on their phone, they’re basically connected to the enterprise communication services through that portal.”

Related Articles

• Avaya, DiVitas Partner for Dual-Mode Mobility
• DiVitas, Samsung Partner for Mobile UC
• Experiencing the Totally Connected Lifestyle

Posted by Garett Rogers @ 9:07 pm

Today at the Web 2.0 Summit, Marissa Mayer announced Google’s partnership with Twitter to bring the search engine real-time search results. Just hours before Google announced the partnership, Microsoft released their own Twitter search tool on Bing.

Instead of being simply a way to search tweets, Google is planning to improve their existing search results by incorporating real-time observations. Here is an example Marissa gave in the official blog post:

The next time you search for something that can be aided by a real-time observation, say, snow conditions at your favorite ski resort, you’ll find tweets from other users who are there and sharing the latest and greatest information.

This new feature isn’t available yet (whereas Bing made their Twitter search available immediately after their announcement). Google says it should be ready in “the coming months”.

Garett Rogers is employed as a programmer for iQmetrix, which specializes in retail management software for the wireless industry. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.

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via blogs.zdnet.com

Google’s Vice-President of Search Marissa Mayer has just made a surprise announcement at the Web 2.0 Expo: a new Google Labs feature called Social Search. They just gave a quick demo of the new feature.

While the details are still sparse, here is what we currently know (and we’re still updating, so check back for more information):

- The bottom of search results will soon have social networking information from your friends, like their Flickr photos or their status updates. It’s a blended search integration, similar to seeing news or image results.

- These are pulled from social networks connected to your Google Profile. The more that are connected, the more social information that will appear in search results.

- They have also improved searching for images using social networks. Images become more relevant using social networking data.

- It will launch in Google Labs in the next few weeks.

via mashable.com