Day two of WES 2009 has come and gone and with its passing we have a few bits and pieces of BlackBerry news to report. While a lot of people were tired from a long night of eating free food and drinking free booze as will.i.am performed on stage, the symposium continued on Wednesday though there really wasn’t much in the way of announcements from companies. Nonetheless, we’re here on location and there’s more to report so hit the jump for the skinny.
Because the Bold is old news on AT&T, we didn’t bother to look at it yesterday as we instead focused our attention on the Curve 8900. Turns out that wasn’t the best move on our part because when looking at it today we noticed that it was running OS 5.0.0.93. Now we all know that OS 5.0 was a long time coming, but to this date RIM has been playing it really close to its chest and has declined to comment on it. Funny thing is that it’s proudly on display right under its nose at its own show, albeit loaded on only one of four Bolds the company was showing off. The case was exactly the same with one of the three 8900s which explains how we missed this yesterday.
Also making an appearance was OS 4.7.0.141 on a Verizon 9530 Storm. It was leaked a while ago so a lot of people are familiar with it, but we do have to say that we’re impressed with how much better the Storm performs with the latest OS builds. Anyway, this was a Verizon branded 9530 but it was RIM itself that had it on display. At least in this instance the company was open about the fact that it’s beta and should be coming out very soon.
Since BlackBerry App World is just over a month old, a lot of new apps appeared at WES in addition to some oldies but goodies that have received considerable updates. Here’s a quick rundown of some of the most talked about apps:
Xobni officially announced that it’s taking the company’s outstanding Outlook plug-in mobile for BlackBerry devices. While it’s being extremely secretive as to what Xobni Mobile will include, we do have an idea of what it looks like thanks in part to a leak less than a week ago. When we stopped by to discuss Xobni Mobile we were met with some pretty stiff resistance and merely directed to the email launch mailing list. To make things worse, Xobni Mobile was not even on display leaving interested onlookers with nothing to see but its Outlook plug-in. Hmm.
Storm users take note: Popular multi-service IM app BeeJive now has finally launched a beta version with you in mind. It’s taken quite a lot of time to get to this point, but we caught up with a few people who were using it on their Storms and we have to say that any Storm user who is looking for a great IM solution is going to be absolutely thrilled with the final product.
Poynt, already an amazing location based services app for movies and yellow page listings, will soon be releasing an update that features reverse number look up through white pages as well as restaurant searches. Utilizing both BlackBerry Maps and Google Maps, Poynt is sure to become even more popular in App World when the update goes live in a few weeks time.
WhitePages Mobile for BlackBerry launched Wednesday and offers, among other things, the ability to import numbers from call logs which makes reverse number look ups a breeze. The app even lets you add a search result to your contact book with the click of the trackball. WhitePages Mobile for BlackBerry runs $6.99 for a six month subscription and is currently available in App World.
Vlingo updated its popular voice-powered application to version 3.0 which adds quite a few new features such as the ability to search the web, exchange text messages with other Vlingo users, dial the phone, update both Facebook and Twitter statuses and launch native and third-party apps through speech. Vlingo 3.0 sells for $17.99 in App World.
Now available in App World is WeatherBug, the popular weather application. Featuring GPS-enabled weather alerts, detailed maps with radar and time-lapse animations from US-based weather cameras, WeatherBug is a bargain at the low, low cost of free.
Read – Xobni Mobile
Read – BeeJive Storm beta
Read – Poynt
Read – WhitePages Mobile for BlackBerry
Read – Vlingo 3.0
