BlackBerry Leap Smartphone Unveiled In India

Canadian manufacturer BlackBerry has unveiled its Leap Smartphone in India. The mid-range Smartphone, which was unveiled at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona earlier this year, will be available in the market next week.

However, the company has not revealed the price of its new 4G-enabled handset yet. In foreign markets, the Smartphone is priced at $275 (approximately Rs 17,000).

BlackBerry Leap sports a 5-inch HD (720x1280p, 294 PPI) touch display. Powered by a relatively older 1.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 dual-core processor, the phone has 2GB RAM and 16GB flash storage in addition to a microSD card slot that supports card up to 128GB.

Leap runs BlackBerry 10 OS (version 10.3) and supports BlackBerry Blend desktop software. It supports Android apps and comes with both Amazon Appstore and BlackBerry World.

The phone sports an 8MP rear camera with auto-focus and flash and support for 1080p video capture, and a 2MP fixed-focus front-facing camera that supports 720p video capture.

BlackBerry Leap comes with a 2800mAh battery with a claimed backup time of 25 hours with heavy use.

In terms of connectivity, the phone supports 3G, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.0 Low Energy and EDR, GPS, FM radio and 4G (FD-LTE 1800MHz only).

BlackBerry Classic launched in India

BlackBerry has launched its long-awaited Classic Smartphone in India. The company has priced it at Rs 31,990. 

The Classic is targeted at BlackBerry loyalists who still use older versions of its physical keyboard devices such as the Bold. The phone features all legacy keys including the menu, back and call answer and reject keys in addition to a touch display.

With the Classic and the recent launch of its Passport Smartphone, BlackBerry is in some ways taking the company back to its roots, focusing mainly on the physical keyboard, which made the company's devices popular among messaging and email junkies.

The BlackBerry Classic sports a 3.5-inch square touch display with a resolution of 720x720p. Powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Plus processor and 2GB RAM, the phone comes with 16GB storage expandable via microSD card up to 128GB. The USP of the phone is its 35 key backlit keyboard.

It runs BlackBerry 10 OS version 10.3.1 and comes with Amazon Appstore in addition to BlackBerry World to download Android apps.

The Classic sports an 8MP auto-focus camera capable of recording 1080p video and a 2MP front-facing camera.

It comes with a 2515mAh battery with a claimed talk time of up to 11.7 hours and standby time of up to 14.5 days on 3G.

In terms of connectivity, the phone supports 3G, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.0, NFC, 4G (only FDD-LTE), FM Radio and GPS.

The BlackBerry Classic is designed to give users a distinct experience that every BlackBerry QWERTY loyalist and high-productivity business customer will love. This device brings the best of BlackBerry features and the keyboard functionalities familiar to BlackBerry Bold and Curve users on a secure and productive platform, with the added performance and agility that power professionals need to be competitive in today's busy world.

BlackBerry launches Classic Smartphone

The Canadian mobile technology company, BlackBerry has launched its long-awaited Classic, a Smartphone it hopes will help it win back market share and woo those still using older versions of its physical keyboard devices.

BlackBerry said the new device, which bears striking similarities to its once wildly popular Bold and Curve handsets, boasts a larger screen, longer battery life, an expanded app library with access to offerings from Amazon.com Inc's Android App store, and a browser three times faster than the one on its legacy devices.

Chief Executive, John Chen said BlackBerry had listened to its fans and brought back the command bar functionality that helped make its legacy phones easy to navigate.

When the company initially introduced its new BlackBerry 10 Operating System and devices early in 2012 it put more emphasis on touch-screens, alienating many fans of its physical keyboard.

Those who moved to the new physical keyboard phones that BlackBerry launched later were unhappy that command keys such as the Menu, Back, Send and End buttons, along with the trackpad had been dropped.

With the Classic and the recent launch of its Passport Smartphone, John Chen is in some ways taking the company back to its roots, re-emphasizing the physical keyboard.

The Waterloo, Ontario based company, which also unveiled a new suite of enterprise applications and software bundles targeted at major corporate clients, said the Classic is on sale immediately on Amazon.com and shopblackberry.com.

Thousands line up to buy Blackberry Bold 9790S

Thousands of Indonesians jammed into a glitzy shopping mall to get hold of the first BlackBerry Bold 9790s being sold worldwide.

Fearing a riot, hundreds of police were deployed outside, tying up traffic in the heart of the capital for hours.

With a 50 percent discount on the $540 phone for the first 1,000 buyers, lines started forming in front of Pacific Place mall on Thursday night. By daybreak, impatient shoppers started rattling the gates.

And when rumors spread that the new smartphones - commonly known as Bellagio - had already sold out, the crowd of 3,000 went crazy. Several people fainted in the crush.

Indonesia, a nation of 240 million people, has experienced a come-from-nowhere tech frenzy in recent years.

With 6 million users, BlackBerry dominates the smartphone market.

RIM offers free apps to BlackBerry customers

Canada's Research In Motion Ltd will offer free premium apps worth more than $100 to appease BlackBerry customers frustrated by service disruption last week which ran for days and affected millions.

Research In Motion said the complete selection of premium apps would become available to download at BlackBerry App World for four weeks beginning October 19.

Enterprise customers will also be offered one month of free technical support as an apology for the outage.

The offering, to compensate for a system failure that left tens of millions of Blackberry users on five continents without email, instant messaging and browsing, could be expensive for RIM and it remains to be seen how many customers will see the offer as an acceptable response.

Analysts have said the company faces a wider problem from the damage to its reputation and loss of corporate customers who no longer think they can rely on the device.

"We've worked hard to earn their (customers') trust over the past 12 years and we're committed to providing the high standard of reliability they expect," said RIM Co-CEO Mike Lazaridis.

"We are taking immediate and aggressive steps to help prevent something like this from happening again."

RIM co-CEOs Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie apologized last week to millions of Blackberry customers for the four-day outage which tarnished the company's reputation and set back its drive to catch up with the likes of Apple Inc and its iPhone.

Some mobile operators such as Spanish group Telefonica SA have already said they will compensate customers, although analysts believe they will also be looking at whether they can pass on some of those costs to RIM.

The apps include games such as Bejeweled, a translation service and the music discovery tool Shazam.

Francisco Jeronimo at IDC said the decision was a clever move by RIM because it would help customers to discover the app service. He said the company was likely to have struck a deal with app developers to keep the cost down.

"More important than the offer itself, is that RIM is showing goodwill and being humble. They recognized the problem, apologized and now they are compensating their users."

Wealth managers prefer Apple over RIM

Wealth managers prefer using Apple products for business rather than Research in Motion's BlackBerry devices, a survey by Aite Group showed.

Of 402 financial advisers polled, 45 percent said they would choose an Apple iPhone or iPad, while 14 percent would pick a BlackBerry.

The research firm, which focuses on financial services, conducted the survey in March, well before the recent RIM outage which left large pockets of BlackBerry users around the world without access to email and other functions.

The study found that using mobile devices was increasingly important to advisers, many of whom service clients with hand-held devices who have access to online brokerage services.

Nearly half the advisers surveyed said having access to business applications was an "important" or "very important" part of their technology strategy for 2011.