PRESS RELEASE: BBM 2.0 update

BBM Voice and BBM Channels Now Available for Android and iPhone Customers

New features also include simple file and photo sharing, location sharing, over 100 new emoticons and Dropbox integration for iPhone, Android and BlackBerry Smartphones

WATERLOO, ONTARIO--(Marketwired - February 13, 2014) - A new version of BBM™ will be available later today for Android™, iPhone and BlackBerry® (NASDAQ: BBRY)(TSX: BB) customers, giving them lots of exciting new features. Android and iPhone customers will now be able to make free voice calls to BBM contacts over a Wi-Fi® or data connection with BBM Voice(i), as well as access BBM Channels. In addition, BBM customers on Android, iPhone and BlackBerry(ii) smartphones will have more to chat about with fast one-click sharing of photos, documents, voice notes and more. BBM customers will also be able to share their live location for a specified amount of time with other BBM contacts by using location sharing, powered by Glympse, and will have 100 new emoticons available to help them say what's on their mind.

"BBM continues to deliver new functionality as a premier messaging platform that provides a simple and effective way to stay connected. Today's announcement gives Android and iPhone customers the rich experience of BBM Voice and BBM Channels - two great ways to connect with friends, family and colleagues, to build out communities around shared interests, and to follow your favorite people and brands," said John Sims, President, Global Enterprise Solutions at BlackBerry. "BBM continues to quickly evolve as a social mobile platform for consumers as well as for business customers through innovative features that give you great new ways to connect and share with each other."

BBM Channels

BBM Channels lets customers chat with other BBM users about topics that interest them. Customers can join channels about a range of topics from products, hobbies and sports to entertainment, fashion, cars and more. Channels can be created by brands, businesses and BBM customers alike and are a great way to communicate directly and immediately with people who share common interests in the broader BBM community.

By posting to their channel, channel owners immediately reach their subscribers with a message that can spark discussions. "Scheduled chat hours" allow BBM customers to have live chats with the channel owner - a great way to engage directly with their favorite channels one on one.

BBM Channels maintains the BBM core values of immediacy, privacy and control. Because BBM Channels live right inside BBM, BBM customers get notified the moment one of the channels they follow has a new post, or when someone responds to their comments.

With BBM Channels, customers can engage with brands or other customers without having to add them to their contact lists, thereby maintaining a high level of privacy. With BBM Channels, customers have the discretion to opt in only to channel brands that are relevant to them and always have control over the channels they subscribe to, while channel owners have control over how subscribers interact with their channel.

For brands and businesses, BBM Channels provides a new way to interact and connect with a highly engaged and targeted mobile audience. There are thousands of brands already using BBM Channels to engage with their customers. More on BBM Channels:

• Open, yet private. Channel owners control the conversation on their channels. Channel owners can choose to: allow subscribers to comment on posts freely or to approve them first; let subscribers chat with them directly anytime, or set chat hours; they can interact with subscribers without ever giving out personal details, or adding them as a personal BBM Contact. And with private channels, channel owners can keep in touch with closer circles on an invite-only basis.
• Channel reporting. Each channel has its own performance dashboard built right in. Channel owners can see stats on how subscribers are engaging with their channel, how many people have viewed each post and how the subscriber base is growing.
• It's fast and easy. Start a channel right from a BlackBerry, iPhone or Android smartphone. It only takes a few minutes to set up a BBM Channel and once it is set up, posting to it is as simple as choosing a photo and adding a short message

Location Sharing

With location sharing powered by Glympse, customers can now share their real-time location with one or several BBM contacts for a specified amount of time - perfect for when people are running late, out with friends and more. BBM puts control in the customers' hands, allowing them to specify how long they want to share their location for, by setting a timer. When the timer runs out the customers' location becomes private again.

Dropbox Support

Built-in support for Dropbox™ makes it easy to send large files like presentations and videos. With Dropbox built in to BBM, you can send a file from your personal cloud directly to a BBM contact. On the receiving end, you can save the file directly to your smartphone or add it to your Dropbox account.

Emoticons

BBM customers have been asking for more emoticons, and now more than 100 new emoticons have been added to help you express yourself. Many of the new emoticons came from ideas submitted by customers!

BBM continues to connect friends, family and colleagues across a myriad of mobile networks, as the standard for mobile instant messaging with a fast, reliable, and engaging experience that puts control of privacy and personal information back in the customers' hands.

Your WhatsApp conversations may not be as safe as you think! O_o

A post popped up from Thijs Alkemade, a computer science and mathematics student at Utrecht University in The Netherlands. The post outlines a bit of the core encryption methods of WhatsApp, highlighting a few of the technical aspects of the service and also noting some big vulnerabilities. 

If you can follow along with the original post, you can see that Thijs runs through two "mistakes" that WhatsApp uses in its methods, both of which are able to be exploited if someone has the know-how. Ultimately he determines that your WhatsApp messages can be decrypted given enough effort by a would-be snoop. 

You should assume that anyone who is able to eavesdrop on your WhatsApp connection is capable of decrypting your messages, given enough effort. You should consider all your previous WhatsApp conversations compromised. There is nothing a WhatsApp user can do about this but except to stop using it until the developers can update it.

Of course this is something that could be (and will need to be) fixed by WhatsApp to patch things up, so they could very well be corrected soon. He also notes that the problems could be avoided if WhatsApp were to use something like TLS (Transport Layer Security), which is exactly what BBM uses for their services.

From Andrew Bocking, Head of BBM for BlackBerry:

I can’t really speak to all of the technical aspects of the WhatsApp system. However people can rest assured that BBM remains a trusted private social network. Where other services may be vulnerable to unwanted snooping or eavesdropping, BBM increasingly uses standard TLS deployment to remove that vulnerability from our service. TLS is a well-known, well-studied protocol. To put it in every day context, this is the same technology used for internet banking.

Hearing things like this can't make cross-platform BBM get here soon enough. We know the demand is crazy high but we just need it to be released. Sadly we're over three weeks in since it was supposed to launch originally, and while it's still on the way, we have no idea when we'll actually see it. Thankfully when it does show up you can rest assured it will be a solid, private messaging service that won't have such issues or vulnerabilities. Something to keep in mind, in light of recent attacks on WhatsApp.

LEAK: BlackBerry 10.2.1.1055 on some devices

Changelog :

- runtime unlocked
- apk files install directly on device without apk to bar conversion or debug token
- Customizable quick settings
- group contacts
- Quick speed dial on Q10
- Music UI changes
- Call dialer changes
- BBM - vibrate on ping, new emoticons
- white balance adjuster
- picture lock password
- IBM notes traveler in accounts settings
- full device monitor
- new charge icon
- custom contact notifications
- wolfram alpha commands
- battery percentage in peak
- hub pinch gesture works
Instagram video upload works, BlackBerry 10 keyboard works without mods


Some image changes:

BlackBerry Outselling Motorola And HTC

With BlackBerry’s declining popularity and with reports of the company recently announcing an operating loss, many have assumed that the Canadian company is on the way to its grave unless someone comes and bails them out. While it might seem that way on the surface, perhaps BlackBerry’s demise and troubles might be greatly exaggerated, at least that’s what a recent report by the Yankee Group seems to suggest. According to the recently published report, it basically tallies up the second quarter results from both Motorola and HTC and based on that report, it was found that despite BlackBerry’s troubles, they were still outselling both these two companies despite the recent BlackBerry Z10 inventory write-down.

For example HTC had recently announced their own operating loss of $101 million, a first of the Taiwanese company in a long time, while Motorola’s own operating loss was reported at $208 million. It was also found that BlackBerry had managed to reach the one million mark of Z10 units sold in the first quarter, versus Nokia who only managed to reach that mark with one of their Lumia devices after it had been on the market for a year. While this report certainly does not negate the problems that BlackBerry is currently facing, it does add some perspective to the entire proceedings.

Defense Readies Networks For LATEST BLACKBERRYS

The Pentagon is outfitting military networks with software to support tens of thousands of BlackBerry Z10 and Q10 smartphones this year, according to the Defense Department and Blackberry officials who, in recent days, have announced the company will sharply scale back commercial sales.

Defense has one of the more sweeping plans among federal agencies to equip employees with brand-name mobile devices that can provide ubiquitous data access and custom apps. Before the Canadian company’s sales model shift, Defense already had sanctioned the BlackBerry 10 smartphones and BlackBerry PlayBook tablets for use on military networks. 

Despite BlackBerry's new business direction, "to date, DoD has seen no impact to its Blackberry's services," Defense spokesman Lt. Col. Damien Pickart said in an email on Tuesday. 

BlackBerry on Friday announced the new strategy, which hinges on sales to large enterprises, such as the federal government, rather than personal shoppers, who largely purchase Apple iPhones and mobile devices based on Google's Android operating system. 

BlackBerry spokeswoman Kara Yi said in an email on Tuesday, "It remains our top priority to continue serving all our customers, including the DoD, and provide the same industry-leading quality products and services organizations have come to expect from BlackBerry." 

The company still will face competition in the government sector, which typically follows consumer trends and would like to march in lockstep with them.

Defense Chief Information Officer Teri Takai stated in the department's overarching mobile device agenda, issued in 2012: "This strategy is not simply about embracing the newest technology -- it is about keeping the DoD workforce relevant in an era when information and cyberspace play a critical role in mission success."

About 9 million of the latest iPhone models flew off the shelves this past weekend, while the combined sales of all BlackBerry versions during the past three months only reached 5.9 million, according to company estimates.  

BlackBerry officials on Tuesday downplayed their hardware business and pointed to recent work with Defense on mobile security software. Certain services can work on top of non-BlackBerry handhelds, including iPhones and Android smartphones, they added. "BlackBerry is much more than a device company," with software that protects phones at the "device, server and network level," Yi said. 

The Canadian company last month gained permission to deploy its latest security services coupled with BlackBerry Z10 and BlackBerry Q10 smartphones on military networks. Defense "is now developing the infrastructure to support BlackBerry 10 smartphones," specifically 10,000 devices this fall and 30,000 by the end of 2013, officials said in a statement at the time. 

iPhones, iPads and Samsung devices also have obtained approvals to operate on Defense networks, as part of a Defensewide shift from office workstations to government-owned gadgets of various makes and models. 

Pickart said on Tuesday, “We are moving toward a secure mobile communications infrastructure that supports a variety of devices, to include BlackBerry. By establishing an agnostic, multi-vendor environment, we've minimized the impact of a single vendor to our current operations.”

In June, Pentagon officials purchased a potentially $16 million service for remotely securing devices in the hands of 300,000 military personnel worldwide. Neither the security nods nor the mobile protection service represent actual device purchases. 

The Pentagon anticipates equipping 100,000 users with mobile devices by February 2014, and ultimately 600,000 military employees. 

It remains to be seen how a potential sale of BlackBerry will impact all of the company’s customers. On Monday, the company tentatively agreed to be taken private under a $4.7 billion buyout deal led by Fairfax Financial Holdings. 

Rumour: BlackBerry Z10 successor the Z30

BlackBerry's next flagship device, and touchscreen successor to the BlackBerry Z10, was expected to be called the BlackBerry A10, according to a report at the beginning of June. But now, as new photos leak of the device, it looks like the name of the new device is actually the BlackBerry Z30.

The report comes from BGR, which got its hands on another leaked photo, this time from ETrade Supply, and reported that the "BlackBerry Z00" stamp on the back of the device's mid-plate indicates that the device will launch as a Z-series phone, and not an A-series device.

For comparison, the BlackBerry Z30's predecessor, the BlackBerry Z10, was the first handset to be launched with a modern touchscreen design and Blackberry 10, and featured a 4.2-inch screen. It was powered by a 1.5GHz Snapdragon processor with 2GB of RAM, and also included an 8-megapixel shooter, LTE, and extras like a micro-HDMI port. Sprint, according to the earlier report on what was being called the A10, opted out of carrying the Z10 because it saw the upcoming handset and said it "felt the A10 was worth the wait."