When Research In Motion (RIM), the makers of BlackBerry smartphones, officially unveiled the latest BlackBerry operating system in late April at WES they failed to properly go into much detail about it. We were teased with a brief (music) video demonstration and that was about it. On Tuesday the company finally revealed in full detail the next iteration of its OS dubbed BlackBerry 6. I’ll run down the most prominent new features. A newly designed home screen allows for customization and arrangement of icons, contacts, and web page shortcuts; context-sensitive Action Menus allows “users [to] bring the most common actions or tasks of an application to the surface”; a Universal Search tool allows you to search keywords that will ping all the phone’s content, the web, and the new BlackBerry App World; an all-new Webkit browser features tabbed browsing, auto-wrap text zoom, pinch-to-zoom, and supports HTML5 content; Social Feeds integrate access to BlackBerry Messenger, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, AOL Instant Messenger, Google Talk, Windows Live Messenger, and Yahoo! Messenger applications, allowing you to view all your friends’ actitivies in one space; it also allows you to “post updates across multiple networks simultaneously”.
The new multimedia experience in BB6 packs a really exciting new feature–the ability to sync your music collection over WiFi. Using BlackBerry Desktop Software 6, you can enable Wi-Fi Music Sync “that allows users to view their entire iTunes or Windows Media Player music libraries from their BlackBerry smartphone, create and edit playlists, as well as select music for download.” As long as you’re in range of your WiFi signal, playlist edits and song information are automatically synced to the phone.
The OS also includes new camera modes and a Podcasts application that allows you to manage audio and video podcasts. A dedicated YouTube app is included, too. All of these new and updated features comprise BlackBerry 6. Consumers will have the chance to get their hands on it August 26 with the launch of BlackBerry Torch, the first BB to come loaded with the new OS. According to RIM, BB6 will be ported to the BlackBerry Bold 9700, BlackBerry Bold 9650, and BlackBerry Pearl 3G “subject to carrier certifications in the months ahead.”
Overall BlackBerry 6 is a welcome and much needed refresh to the aging BlackBerry UI. The most exciting update is the system-wide multi-touch experience. The Storm and Storm 2 smartphones did pack capacitive touchscreens, but BB6-supported phones will be designed around the multi-touch experience consumers are used to finding in devices like Apple’s iPhone and Motorola’s Droid. A new Webkit browser will definitely wow users with its speed and future-proof support for HTML5. The new social networking features also look promising. As exciting as all of these new additions to the BlackBerry platform may sound, almost all of them have already been implemented in other smartphones for years. With BB6 RIM is essentially playing catch up with the big players (ie. Apple, Google). RIM has failed to incorporate that extra pinch of bam that separates itself from the competition. While BB6 definitely pushes BlackBerry devices closer to the competition in terms of features and aesthetics, it does not give cell phone buyers a definitive reason to choose this OS over another one. BBM’s sheen can only last so long.
Look after the break for the full PR plus a “sneak peak” video.
[Via Engadget; Gizmodo] Continue reading RIM formally details new BlackBerry 6 OS
