As Research In Motion’s (RIMM) January 30th BlackBerry 10 unveiling draws closer, nearly every last detail surrounding RIM’s first two BlackBerry 10-powered smartphones will likely soon emerge. The vendor has a long history of leaks leading up to its new device announcements, and this time around RIM reps toured the world showing the phones to every carrier that would meet with them. Pictured once again over the weekend by N4BB is RIM’s first new QWERTY phone, which is code-named “N-Seriers” and expected to bear the name “BlackBerry X10” at launch. No fresh details accompany the newly leaked photos, but rumored specs from earlier reports include  a 720 x 720-pixel display with a pixel density of 330 ppi and integrated NFC. Additional images

View the original article here

The New York Times published a fairly silly article on Tuesday that revealed BlackBerry devices have become a source of mild embarrassment for people who hang out at exclusive ritzy country clubs. This sparked a predictable backlash from some RIM (RIMM) fans who insisted that their favorite smartphones were cool because they were selling well in South Africa. In between these two extremes, CIO’s Al Sacco penned a thoughtful piece that I think honestly represents a lot of angst that longtime BlackBerry users are feeling right now: They love their devices for their keyboards, notification systems and messaging capabilities, but they also know that they’re hopelessly out of date in many key areas. The key part of Sacco’s piece is his confession

View the original article here

Android’s rise to the top of the mobile operating system food chain as measured by device proliferation has been remarkably swift, but not without its drawbacks. Due to the nature of Google’s open source OS and its aggressive strategy, smartphone vendors that make use of the platform have each gone their own way with software development, hardware design and other key elements. As a result, Android fragmentation, which might be defined as the spread of diverging versions of the Android OS across devices with varying core characteristics, was born. Whether or not fragmentation is a problem in the Android ecosystem is a topic that is intensely debated by enthusiasts. Some claim the problem will eventually lead to Android’s downfall while others

View the original article here