You’re Going to Want to JOIN the Brand New N4BB Community! (June,2012)

Hello N4BB readers and Team BlackBerry. We hope you had a great weekend and have rested up enough to battle your way through the wretched Monday. Good thing we have a little something to take your mind off of things. We’d like to introduce to you the new N4BB community!We’ll start by telling you the bad news. Anyone who previously had registered for an N4BB account, unfortunately no longer has one. We know, we know When we went to the new platform for our community, we had the daunting notion knowing that everyone would have to register again. However, we truly believe you’ll love the new kickass features enough to dismiss the mere 2min it may take to register at http://n4bb.com/forum/#/entry/register.Let’s take a look at some of the new features:New ForumsWe have a completely new forum system that we’re really excited about. It’s super easy to find the latest discussed topics. If you’re looking for something older, you can still look for it based on its category (like you’d see in a traditional forum layout). The new forums are lightweight, but very feature rich. We believe you’ll find the new N4BB forums to be pretty awesome.Badge systemDo you like Foursquare? Why not try to earn N4BB badges! That’s right, as you comment, make posts, and get a lot of accolades you’ll earn badges. You can even earn the N4BB Prestige badge, which will allow you to get a free BlackBerry device of your choice! Get rewarded for what you do at the N4BB community and show it off. Visiting your profile lets yourself and others in the community see your stats.Activity feedSimilar to how our old system was setup, there is an activity feed to show what has been going on in the community. You can add a status update and view the leader-board of top N4BB members. Make new threads, comment on others and more on a daily basis and you’ll quickly climb the charts! Those who can keep top titles will earn special gifted apps and accessories from us for just being so awesome.Polls and moreCreating new threads isn’t the only thing you can do. The new N4BB community allows you to start polls too. This is a great way to get feedback from the community on virtually anything. Start a discussion just around a question you might have about “which BlackBerry should I buy next?”The new N4BB community is simply amazing. We hope you’ll find it as cool as we do. There are many, many more features, but these are just a few we thought you should know first. To begin your journey as an N4BB member, we’d be honored if you signed up at http://n4bb.com/forum/#/entry/register. We thank each and every one of you for being a reader and hope you thoroughly enjoy your stay!

Alec Saunders Interviewed on BlackBerry 10 at MobileMonday in Indonesia (June,2012)

Alec Saunders, the VP of developer relations for Research In Motion, was on hand at the MobileMonday event in Kuningan, South Jakarta. Saunders was there to attract more Indonesian developers to build mobile apps for BlackBerry 10. Indonesia is the third-largest community of BlackBerry developers after India and China, said Saunders.Here’s the interview of Alec Saunders from Jakarta Globe:How would you describe BlackBerry 10? We’re trying to take things that people love about BlackBerry and modernize that experience. BlackBerry 10 devices are about sharing and [being] social. The keyboard learns how you type and adapts to the way you work. The device can be used with one hand. You’re sitting at a meeting, your phone buzzes and you can check it casu ally.What’s your strategy for rolling it out? You can look back at what we have been doing over the last nine months. We started by telling developers to build apps for PlayBook [RIM’s tablet device], because apps for PlayBook are going to be apps that we run eventually. We gave developers PlayBook devices to get working with. We are repeating that strategy all over again with BlackBerry 10, by giving out a large number of BlackBerry 10 alpha devices [to developers]. It’s a third of the size of a PlayBook and a very similar device. Our goal is to have tens of thousands of apps.Are you going to reach out to Android developers as well? We already are. About a third of the apps in the PlayBook store today are Android apps. It literally takes 10 minutes to take Android apps and put them for sale in the BlackBerry store.Can we run BlackBerry 10 on other devices by RIM? Eventually, everything that runs PlayBook 2.0 today will run BlackBerry 10. Our intention is to release BlackBerry 10 on handsets and tablet devices as well. It won’t work on our old devices. BlackBerry 10 needs a dual-core processor for its sophisticated graphics; it’s a completely new operating system that takes much more memory than old BlackBerry devices.With so many sophisticated operating systems out there, will you be a little late with BlackBerry 10? If you rush an operating system to market, it’s a bad idea. … I don’t think too much of the Android and the iOS devices at this point. I think iOS is designed for five years ago. … It was designed with the idea that Steve Jobs had, that it would be a media consumption device. And that’s not what a BlackBerry is. It’s not for sitting on the train and watching TV.And Android, there are now 3,977 different Android devices out there in the marketplace. For developers, it’s a nightmare. It’s impossible to test them all. So developers now are getting to the phase of, ‘Hey, maybe there are some things better than Android.’Another thing about Android is â€" and Google even admitted it â€" it’s a rip-off of an Apple experience. So Apple is a five-year-old experience, Android is a clone of that five-year-old experience. We’re a new way of thinking about what a smartphone is. We’re going to take the smartphone back to a communication device, not something you sit around and watch movies with.The PlayBook wasn’t very successful when it went to market. Your thoughts? I wasn’t with the company when the PlayBook launched, and I’m just going to leave it at that. I think there were many different things that could have been done to make the PlayBook launch more successful than it was, and we’re doing those things now. Not only am I optimistic about BlackBerry 10, I think I have the most exciting job in the world. I get to go and talk to developers every day about what we can do with these products.

N4BB Audio Show – Episode 7: We Talk BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha, Jam Tour, & More with RIM’s Patrick Mollins (June,2012)

Subscribe to N4BB Audio Show podcast RSS Feed directly or in iTunesPatrick Mollins, a BlackBerry Evangelist for Research In Motion, took the time to speak with us again. In this podcast we discuss the successes of the initial BlackBerry 10 Jam event in Orland, Florida and the new Jam World Tour.Additionally, we discuss the benefits and overall feedback of the BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha devices. Patrick tells us how RIM is working closely with developers and how they’re morale within the company is higher than ever. Take a listen to this edition of the N4BB Audio Show and let us know your thoughts.