BlackBerryInsight

Some days ago we wrote about President Elect Barack Obama might have to give up his BlackBerry.

Now, this story takes another chapter on CNet:

In light of the recent breach of President-elect Barack Obama’s cell phone records, a senator on Monday sent a letter (PDF) to the Justice Department asking how many investigations or prosecutions the department has undertaken for violations of the Telephone Records and Privacy Protection Act.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) sent the letter to Matthew Friedrich, acting assistant attorney general, noting that “data privacy breaches involving the sensitive phone records of ordinary Americans are occurring with greater frequency.”

[...]

Source: CNet

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Service Highlights

• Access your account details
• View up-to-date account balances
• View transaction history

Though this mobile service does not provide that much in functions than just passive access it is a step forward. It helps to check on the go if a customer paid invoice number #4711 already or not. The service works pretty well with the BlackBerry Curve 8320 browser (which I used for testing) but it should work on new BlackBerry devices like the Bold, Flip and Storm as well.

Mobile Website for HSBC Commercial Banking: https://mobile.commercial.hsbc.com.hk

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RealVNC, the home of VNC remote control software, is extending its flagship VNC Enterprise Edition product to mobile devices. VNC now supports a wide range of mobile handsets and PDAs including Symbian, Microsoft Mobile, iPhone, Linux and Blackberry platforms, with support for additional platforms to follow.

Source: Cambridgenetwork

Check it out at: http://www.realvnc.com/
Check out the VNC Mobile Summary as well!

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Hundreds of people lined up at some Verizon Wireless stores on Friday to purchase the new BlackBerry Storm. The device is Research in Motion’s first touch-screen phone, and could represent a competitive threat to Apple Inc.’s iPhone.

At Verizon’s mid-town Manhattan store, more than 200 people had waited in line to buy the new phone, many of whom were turned away after the store ran out less than an hour after opening. Police restored order after the frustrated customers caused a disturbance.

Verizon said hundreds of other customers were in lines outside its east coast stores, but that it had “plenty of phones” and was expecting additional shipments.

[...]

Source: redOrbit

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ThinkGrid, a provider of managed IT services, today announced that it has launched a range of services including Hosted desktop, Exchange, VoIP, Blackberry Enterprise Server and Dynamic Server. The company states that with this move, its customers no longer a need to make huge capital investments in or face the burden of maintaining and replacing PCs, servers, software and telephony systems. It adds that customers only pay for what they use, and based on the needs of their business can scale up and down instantly.

[...]

Source: Webhosting.info

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Some time ago we announced this review already. Now I finally found time to write about it! It follow the previous quite successful hardware review about the Solar Charger for BlackBerry.

While the solar charger was a small solar panel powered charging device this battery is massive! You can juice it up with that much to be able to charge a flattened BlackBerry 8700 device 5 times to 100% (see real life test results below). And this along with a considerably small size and low weight which makes it easy to take it on a camping trip. I remember about a year ago I was having a safari-like kind of trip to Fraser Island in Australia. I was tracking our route with my BlackBerry Pearl and Skylab’s first version of the MobileTracker. After the first day of tracking my BlackBerry Pearl’s battery was empty. Well, using Bluetooth and tracking for about 10 hours of driving around in such sand dunes uses some power. Anyway, I wasn’t able to track the last two days on the island while we were discovering some hidden lagunes and crocodile places … This was the place I could have needed the Battery Pack for! By the way: it would have also charged my external Bluetooth GPS receiver.

Real Life Test Results

So from my point of view those results are pretty impressive. Like the solar charger this Battery Pack comes with several adapters which can be used to connect it to nearly any kind of mobile device including Bluetooth GPS receivers, other phones (iPhone, Nokia, etc.) and technically all mini and normal USB powered devices. The device has 5 small red colored LED indicators and a button. Once you press the button the LEDs will show you the battery pack’s charging state (5 LEDs: fully charged; 1 LED: 20% charged). There is another LED at the bottom of the circle you can see on the device which indicates that the Battery Pack is being charged or it is charging another device.

The full package looks like this:

Official Battery Pack for BlackBerry Features:

• Circuit protection design against over-charge and over discharge
• Sleek Design
• LED lights show different power status
• LED Torchlight function
• Two kinds of output voltage with automatic recognition
• Reliably charges most digital cameras, MP3, PDA, PSP, PMP, and many other digital items
• Ideal for long flights or outdoor adventure trips
• Keep as spare battery for your phone - economical and extremely effective
• Quick charging
• DC in 13.8V DC out 5.3/8.4V
• Dimensions L106*W40*H24(mm)
• Weight 148g

Conclusion: the Battery Pack for BlackBerry Wireless Handheld is a very handy and neat pack. It is essential if you are travelling around and need to have some power at hand in case your BlackBerry runs out of power. The only disadvantage I see is that the Battery Pack itself needs to be charged with the power adapter that is part of the package (see image above). It would make sense to charge this device by USB as well, right? Anyway, besides this small issue the device awesome!

5 Stars - Recommendation!

• Price: US$ 49.95
• Official Name: U20 5400 External Battery for Mobile Devices
• Website: http://100milligrams.com/5400-external-battery-mobile-devices-p-81.html

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I don’t know if the timing was coincidental with this not-so-secret new BlackBerry, but the Google Mobile team just updated the Google Sync application. The software now supports two-way contact synchronization with BlackBerry handsets and it already supported Google Calendar, so you’re covered there as well. There appear to be a few bugs reported by some early adapters and I’m not terribly surprised.

[...]

Source: jkOnTheRun

This looks really interesting! As we already have quite famous articles on desktop Windows synchronization as well as Mac OS X synchronization I will check this out more detailed and find out if it really works so well on my BlackBerry.

If you want to try yourself you might want to point your BlackBerry browser to: http://m.google.com.

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Keep track of time with this nifty little utility on your phone. With this tiny tool, your phone will chime on each full hour, like most digital watches. But there is much more.

The chime sound is fully customisable. There are 18 chimes installed with the program, ranging from very modest time pulse signals and subtle zen-style sounds to sonars, bells, church bells, Big Ben, etc…. Ofcourse you can also set any of your personal favourite MP3 (or other soundfile formats) as chime sound. Or, you can even let your phone TELL you the time in “Speaking Clock” mode.

You can select the chime to be played once every hour, or use the “churchbell” mode to play the chime X times the actual hour.

Since you probably don’t want to be woken up each hour at night, you can choose to play the chime only during the hours you want it, i.e. only from 9 a.m. till 5 p.m.

Hourly Chime runs fully in the background, has very small file size and consumes very little battery power.

FEATURES:

• Fully customizable chime application
• Use any of the built-in chime sounds or use your own MP3 sounds or music
• Built-in speaking clock as alternative to chime sound
• Select chime frequency: hourly or quarterly
• Select chime mode: play once or churchbell mode
• Volume setting of chime sound
• Automatically disable chime sounds during night time or any other time you don’t want them
• Runs fully in the background
• Available languages: English - French - German - Dutch

The application is available for Blackberry 81xx(PEARL), 83xx(CURVE), 88xx and 9000 (BOLD).
Retail price is $6.99

Product links:
- Direct link to the product information page on our website: http://www.aimproductions.be/productview.php?title=Hourly%20Chime&platform=Blackberry

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Everyone who is implementing GTD (Getting Things Done) no matter on their BlackBerry or “offline” (like on paper, notebooks, whatever) knows what contexts and next actions are. It is actually pretty easy to use any kind of task application on a BlackBerry to do so but most of them including the original BlackBerry Tasks app are very cumbersome to use. So it is not really productive to do so but productivity and being more productive is a major goal for personal self-improvement.

Besides the fact that you want to be productive you might also want to synchronize your tasks with your desktop system like Microsoft Outlook. We have already wrote a complete howto on how to set this up with Windows PC’s as well as with Mac OS X computers. However, the majority of BlackBerry users are business users like you and me. So you might have got your BlackBerry from your employer and you are not allowed to sync’ it with your desktop. But the device came by default with wireless synchronization of your emails, tasks, calendar items, contacts and so on. So if your tasks are synchronized with your let’s say Microsoft Exchange account you will also get the same tasks onto your desktop Outlook client as you have on your BlackBerry. This applies to your contexts too which appear as categories in Outlook. However, if you are using NextAction! on your BlackBerry you might also projects.

Projects in the field of GTD
A project is defined in wikipedia like this:

Projects — Every open loop in one’s life or work which requires more than one physical action to achieve becomes a project. These projects are tracked and periodically reviewed to make sure that every project has a next action associated with it, and thus can be moved forward.

In NextAction! projects and context are internally handled quite similar. Their information is stored in the usual category field. While a context is a normal name / string; a project’s category carries a prefix (default: “p:”). This makes projects appear in your Outlook as categories as well but it will look like this:

p:Company Setup

However, the cool thing is: those project settings are carried over to Outlook as well. Though they appear as normal categories the data is not lost during any kind of synchronization. No matter the sync’ is being done in a wireless or the old school way.

So once the synchronization via BES (BlackBerry Enterprise Server) is running - it should have been set up by your BlackBerry admin - you do not need to set up anything else. This is pretty awesome and very convenient.

As I wrote in previous posts I am using NextAction! to implement GTD with my BlackBerry. It works pretty well with all current BlackBerry models and even comes with a 30 day demo version. The new version 3.0 also features a someday/maybe list which is very useful for many GTD pros. I just use it from time to time … you could say: someday/maybe …

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U.S. President-elect Barack Obama may have to give up using his much loved Blackberry mobile phone because of Congressional and court-related legal strictures.

U.S. law allows Congress and the country’s courts to subpoena e-mail issued by a serving President, and subject them to the scrutiny of public records laws. There may also be security issues about carrying around trackable cell phones.

Though no decision has been made by the Obama transition team on what Obama will or will not carry, the Washington Times quotes insiders as saying that Obama may be in for some withdrawal pains.

[...]

Source: Newspost Online.

Man, we need a president with a BlackBerry! Change the law!

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