Jibi

The wild and crazy guys (really, should meet them and you’d understand what I mean) over at CrackBerry.com have obtained a copy of the BlackBerry OS 4.3.1 beta for the BlackBerry Curve and BlackBerry Pearl devices. If you haven’t heard about OS 4.3.1, then you will be in for quite a surprise with just what’s being added. While we’ll still have the naysayers who want to bash RIM and BlackBerry for it’s lack of novel and practical functionality found in the other all-in-one-even-gives-you-a-reach-around devices, this particular device OS upgrade will be very powerful once released.

From my own personal experience with OS 4.3.1 for the Curve 8300 and 8310 devices, an earlier version than what is being shown on CrackBerry.com, I did not have the video recording functionality. Upon that observation about a month ago, I jokingly stated to someone I was showing, "Yeah, it didn’t unlock the video recorder, darn it!" Well, if what we’re seeing is the truth, video recording was apparently enabled a few revisions later. Also added to this version is DataViz’s Documents To Go Office Suite, a very popular Palm application that has had us patiently awaiting it’s arrival on the BlackBerry since DataViz’s official announcement nearly six months ago at the Wireless Enterprise Symposium in Orlando. Full OS 4.3.1 feature list, after the jump!

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A couple weeks ago, your faithful friends at BGR brought you the news of T-Mobile’s BlackBerry Curve Breakfast Tour making it’s rounds across America. To follow up on that post, we decided to bring you an exclusive recap from one of the breakfasts.

I cannot personally vouch for the other events, but I will say that T-Mobile and RIM picked an absolutely great venue to introduce the device to the city of Atlanta (post-launch, of course) – a club now named Opera. The storied history of this venue dates back to Peter Gatien, famed owner of the Limelight nightclubs, opening up a club named Petra after moving Limelight to New York (Disco Bloodbath, Party Monster, the Club Kids, etc.) from Atlanta. It was a former 1920′s opera house, hence the recently remodeled club interior and new name (formerly eleven50). Hit the jump for the rest!

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As pointed out by forum-goer rsnadel on BlackBerry Forums, it would appear that Research In Motion’s BlackBerry Internet Service, their consumer offering, will soon be upgraded to version 2.4, citing a Knowledge Base article with the details.

What are the enhancements over BIS 2.3 and earlier versions? Although the KB article states it now supports MP3 attachments, this was supposedly added in version 2.3. They have now added support for WAV file attachments, making way for non-BES corporate users to utilize Cisco and Avaya (and other) modular messaging systems that distribute voicemail through the ever-popular WAV format.

Other enhancements include support for wireless meeting request, read and delivery receipts, vCard attachments, and message status reconciliation for BIS, Yahoo and some third-party email accounts.

No dates are given on the deployments across the carrier platforms, but our guess would be sooner than later.

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We’ve all done it. One of our friends posts a bulletin on MySpace with a fun survey, be it an adult-focused topic (Who did you last sleep with?) or a historical-focused topic (During your senior year in high school…), and you decide to join in on the action and re-post that survey in your own bulletin with your own answers. This is just harmless fun, right?

I’ve noticed from time to time that certain surveys floating around contain rather interesting questions, such as these:

[Three] What’s your middle name?
[Seven] What’s your mom’s maiden name?

Of course, these are surrounded by fairly innocent questions, such as:

[Five] Does your crush like you back?
[Seventeen] When was the last time you cried?
[Thirty] Have you ever kissed in the rain?

Due to all of the fluff in these sort of surveys, you really just never think of the danger that actually lurks out there with these rather loaded questions. Obviously mom’s maiden name is one of the most common verification questions used in the history of said questions, whether it be your pass-phrase verification for your online banking account or a password reminder for your eBay login.

Are your MySpace friends really the only people reading your survey answers? I’d personally like to side with caution when it comes to this sort of information, so think about it the next time you’re about to answer "What is your favorite baseball team?"

After one month of the device being available from Sprint retailers and corporate channels, the launch party road show finally starts making it’s rounds throughout the United States. While this isn’t obvious ground-breaking information by any means, we still have a picture of the party schwag received from the show, including a free BlackBerry 8830. No doubt, that was the highlight of this launch party. The event was held at The Glenn Hotel, a boutique overnight in Atlanta. This is one of the most highly recommended hotel stays in the Peach State, so you can imagine the effort put into this event by Sprint/Nextel (or is it just Sprint now?) and Research In Motion. A $500 travel voucher was raffled away at the end of the night (sadly, I did not win). Vendors were on site included the heavy-hitting Telenav, and the Sprint-exclusive GPS tracking companies, Xora and ActSoft. This event was top-notch, so bravo to Research In Motion and Sprint/Nextel.

The schwag (*ahem* parting gifts) was presented in a sexy black bag (yes, I feel like we’re reporting on a Hollywood party) and featured a BlackBerry 8830 (Sprint, of course) and a champagne glass (with M&M’s).

Fresh on the heels of our friends at miblackberry.com, we were curious and decided to look at our BGR community visitors to get an idea of the more interesting devices being used to browse the website. For those not aware of what a browser user agent actually is, it is the standardized identity of your browser to web servers. This helps with the serving of webpages for certain browsers, amongst other uses.

For example, a standard user agent for Internet Explorer 7.0 would show up as:
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3

From a website statistics standpoint, this information can be used for trending analysis to cater content to certain browsers. In recent years, with the rise of mobile web usage from devices such as the iPhone and BlackBerry, it can be used to offer streamlined content tailored to the carrier networks and mobile device browsers (WAP content, for example). With that said, we obviously have a different reason for looking at the data being provided, albeit usually for our own personal amusement and curiosity. Listed below are some of the more interesting user agents that have visited BGR. Check them out, after the jump!

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