TamsBlackBerry – the BlackBerry blog

Network issues have plagued carriers all over the world. After AT&T made headlines, the issue is now more or less universal.

An FT.com interview now quoted a O2 head as follows:

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The head of O2 has apologised to customers who could not make phone calls because the mobile operator’s London network was overwhelmed by bandwidth-hungry smartphones.

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O 2 ran into difficulties in the capital during the second half of 2009 as customers with smartphones such as Apple’s iPhone ramped up use of applications that repeatedly pull data off the internet at short intervals.

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Even though the iPhone definitely is a bandwidth hog, reports of O2 bandwidth issues were covered by industry journals like Mobile ever since 2008.

IMHO, the iPhone is not to blame – instead, blame the overselling of mobile broadband. Today, many households are sold mobile bandwidth rather than wired service and a WiFi router without actually needing it.

This causes large-style network loads (think Windows updates) which are completely unneeded – and much more significant than one or two iPhones.

IMHO, the iPhone is used as a scapegoat here – what do you think?

Image: Wikimedia Commons / HMRC

Nowadays, producing a prototype device does not cost much. For a manufacturer like RIM, building a few prototypes is a non-issue.

PocketBerry now shares the image below:

It is described as follows:

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Here’s a very odd prototype that looks something like an HTC phone and perhaps has a slider keyboard in landscape mode. What we see in the image is a trackball in between the BlackBerry button and back button. The device is of course touch screen but looks quite old if you ask me.

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Looks like the rumors of a touchscreened QWERTY box are not as false as originally assumed…

Whether you like it or not: China is a huge market for cell phones. Unfortunately, getting statistics on the market is somewhat difficult – which is why having China Mobile talk on 3G handset sales is especially interesting.

Marbridge Daily claims the following distribution:

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8% of procured handsets run Windows Mobile, 16% use the Symbian mobile OS, and 4% use Apple’s iPhone OS, while the rest operate either BREW or the manufacturer’s self-owned OS.
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So much for the death of Symbian and the dominance of iPhone / BlackBerry…

Image: Wikimedia commons / Edzhgz

Rumors about an upgraded Tour have been around for some time. We now know that the critter will be called Tour 2 9650, and furthermore know that it looks like this:

The Boy Genius got his hands onto a prototype, and ended up pretty impressed. The CPU is faster, and the keyboard is as great as always – his final verdict reads as follows:

All in all a much-needed upgrade to keep Verizon and Sprint’s BlackBerry lineup current, and it might even be the device that sways me from my BlackBerry 9700… Photos in the gallery!

Let’s see when the critter drops…

Looks like the ebook game has just started off for good – Amazon reports that it sold more Kindle books than hardcopy books on the 24th of December.

The release goes as follows:

Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) today announced that Kindle has become the most gifted item in Amazon’s history. On Christmas Day, for the first time ever, customers purchased more Kindle books than physical books. The Kindle Store now includes over 390,000 books and the largest selection of the most popular books people want to read, including New York Times Bestsellers and New Releases.

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Not much to add here…

As the web gets more and more interactive (AJAX, anyone?), having a fast JavaScript engine is one of the key elements in delivering a good web experience. On the desktop, browser makers work hard on optimizing their JavaScript engines due to public scrutiny – in mobile, this effect has not taken place so far.

Our friends at NS Basic Corp’s have performed a little benchmark of the various browsers, and ended up with the results outlined below – faster means higher score:

Anybody of you surprised by any of the results?

OtterBox can be considered one of the oldest case makers on their market: an OtterBox is now almost a household term for a very sturdy case. The BlackBerry Bold 9700 is their latest victim:

BlackBerry Bold 9700 Commuter case

BlackBerry Bold 9700 Impact case

Unfortunately, neither of the two products offers the waterproofness and general sturdyness seen on older models…

When it comes to smartphone battery life, the key method for increasing battery life is disabling unneeded functions like GPS, WiFi or Bluetooth. But the question remains: does turning off feature X really pay off, or is it better to leave it on for greater convenience?

The folks at AllAboutSymbian’s used Nokia’s freely available Energy Profiler to find out which feature drains how much power – they compared the amount of power needed before and after turning on the feature, and then posted the resulting charts.

Even though the figures were obtained on a Nokia N96 and thus can’t be interpolated to other devices (for example, larger screens tend to drain more power), they are nevertheless interesting – get the full load at the URL below:
http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/features/item/How_to_Know_how_…

It’s the end of the year. This means next to no news, and loads of top-XYZ lists.

While we usually ignore these beautiful critters on the Tamoggemon Content network, Gizmodo’s most-useless gadgets of the decade list struck my interest.

While most of the victims are weird, largely useless gadgets, the following boxen also made it on the list:

• Sony Clié PEG-NZ90 (IMHO undeserved)
• Nokia N-Gage (all incarnations)
• AppleTV (oh, the horror)
• Motorola Q9m (not sure about the Verizon UI)
• Omnia II (IMHO undeserved)

Feel that the ratings are justified? Let us know in the comments!

Don’t ask me why, but it looks like politicians in the US seem to have a collective alcohol problem, which gets magnified in the Winter due to the availability of various warm hard liquors.

Nope, I am not sarcastic – after the idiocy in Maine, we now have somebody wanting to force retailers to print SAR labels as big as device prices onto the device labels.

SFGate claims the following:

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San Francisco would become the first city in the country to require that cell phone retailers label the devices with the level of radiation they emit under a controversial proposal being discussed at the Department of the Environment and endorsed by Mayor Gavin Newsom.

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Anyone of you want t bet that we will see something dumber in a few days?

Market research firms like AC Nielsen make their money by providing survey data to paying customers. However, these must be attracted – in order to do that, they sometimes give the press free sample data. The latest such sample concerned the most-used phones in the USA. This data is not sale-, but rather usage-based.

The results will be surprising for most of us – RIM and Apple are the only smartphone makers whose products made it into the top-10:

via NielsenWire

In the US, RIM recently had a few unexplained outages in its server farm. As BlackBerry devices tend to be extremely dependent on their backend, this caused large-scale service interruptions.

GearLog now reports the following:

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“Root cause is currently under review, but based on preliminary analysis, it currently appears that the issue stemmed from a flaw in two recently released versions of BlackBerry Messenger (versions 5.0.0.55 and 5.0.0.56) that caused an unanticipated database issue within the BlackBerry infrastructure,” according to RIM. “RIM has taken corrective action to restore service.”

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Given that TamsBB is a BlackBerry blog, all I can do is urge you to get that BBM update – no further comments on the architecture .

As of now, this has not been confirmed. As Intel’s German press team is a bunch of dolts, we don’t have much of a chance to verify it either. Anybody with more information is urged to post a comment!

Configurations like the one below (MSI Wind U100 linked to a FullHD monitor with excellent analog signal processing) allow a netbook to go much further than it was originally intended – I stopped purchasing workstations for secondary offices the moment I got my MSI Wind. Unfortunately, Intel isn’t too happy about this – and is said to take drastic measures.

According to the German c’t magazine, Pine Trail netbooks without an external GFX chip (think ION) are limited to a VGA resolution of 1400×1050 when attached to an external monitor.

Even though this has not been conformed in practical tests so far, I felt like making you all aware of this issue – it’s better to be warned once too many than to end up with a half-useless bunch of junk…

Not much has been known about RIM’s 8530 so far – but this is not particularly important, as its GSM-based sister device (the 8520) has already been reviewed to death. Nevertheless, Engadget just got their hands onto an 8530 from Verizon:

The final verdict is surprisingly good, even though the folks always had a warm side for BlackBerry devices:

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We love the Curve and the Tour, but we’re having trouble understanding the relationship between the two devices. For a supposedly “low end” device, the Curve 8530 packs many “high end” features that the Tour lacks. We’re expecting this to be remedied when RIM and the carriers finally decide to launch (or even announce) the Tour2, which should bring WiFi and the optical trackpad to the original Tour form factor. For now though, we’re going to stick with the Tour over the Curve. The international roaming capabilities and better keyboard are enough to keep us from switching, although the WiFi would be convenient. When choosing which device is right for you, it really comes down to a matter of what’s more important: international global roaming and a better keyboard or a slightly smaller package with WiFi and an optical trackpad — assuming, naturally, that you’re brave enough to deal with a QVGA display here in the year 2009.

Further information can be had at the URL below:
http://www.engadget.com/2009/12/21/blackberry-curve-8530-hands-on/