BlackBerry Achievement Awards Public Voting Now Open
The BlackBerry Achievement Awards is an annual award covering several categories that recognize excellence in BlackBerry App Development. The semi finalists have been chosen and now it comes down to the public vote to decide the winners.
Formerly the Wireless Achievement Awards, the BlackBerry Achievement Awards will feature the following categories:
- App of the Year
- Putting Customers First
- Mobile Innovator of the Year
- Making the World a Better Place
- Entrepreneur of the Year
Winners will be announced at this year’s BlackBerry Live conference in Orlando Florida. The first place prize is Travel, accommodation and a conference pass.
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Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blackberrycool/mYUU/~3/s6xi9Igbf2s/
Yellow Pages Launches Free Business Finder BlackBerry 10 Native App
Yellow Pages has launched their free business finder app on BlackBerry 10. The app was coded natively for the new platform but is also available for legacy BlackBerry devices.
Here are some of the new app’s features:
- Business, person and reverse phone look-up
- Local proximity based search, using GPS
- Homepage categories added for quick navigation
- Local deals displayed on homepage when available
- Refine your search results and find businesses with photos, videos, reviews and deals
- Read user reviews and option to write and share your own reviews
- View videos, photos, ads and visit websites (where available)
- Get directions
- Business details that include hours of operation, payment methods and more…
- Type ahead functionality for the “What” and “Where” boxes
- Share listing results with others via e-mail, sms, Facebook or Twitter
Click here to download Yellow Pages for free from BlackBerry World.
http://appworld.blackberry.com/webstore/content/825/
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Take Part in Robert Rodriguez’ Short Film: Two Scoops
As part of the BlackBerry Keep Moving Project, filmmaker director Robert Rodriguez is enlisting help from the public to appear in the short film by submitting a photo of themselves as one of the many missing person posters. He also needs help designing the film’s monster.
Submit your photo for the films many prop missing person photos or if illustration and costume design interest you, design the film’s monster that the twin female leads will be hunting. Weather you help with as one of the film’s victims or villains you’ll be taking part in an amazing collaborative project.
Click here to lend your likeness or your talents to Robert Rodriguez’ Two Scoops film.
Click here to follow Robert Rodriguez on Twitter for updates on the movie.
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Want To Upgrade Your Verizon Phone? You’ll Have To Wait Four Months
If you have tried to score an early upgrade from Verizon in the past year or two, you might have walked away disappointed. Ever since they picked up the iPhone in January, 2011, they essentially stopped allowing customers to upgrade before their eligibility date.
“If you’re a doctor and absolutely need it, that’s a situation where we can help,” a Verizon store manager told me last year when I attempted an early upgrade. “And even then, there are absolutely no early upgrades on iPhone.”
Instead of stonewalling customers, Verizon did make a concession. Previously they featured a 22-month upgrade cycle. That is, while your contract runs 24 months, you could upgrade your phone two months before your contract expired. In the last year or so, they reduced that to a 20-month upgrade cycle. That certainly compensates, at least a little, for the absolute rule of no early upgrades.
Today they changed that, and at the expense of the consumer. From their corporate newsroom comes a notice that customers are now on a 24-month upgrade cycle. That is, you can’t upgrade before your contract actually expires. This is sure to spark some anger among consumer advocacy groups.
In a way this makes sense. The staggered nature of upgrade and contract expiration dates can cause some confusion among consumers, even if it benefits them. It also probably benefits Verizon in terms of paperwork. But it’s also a big drawing point for retaining customers. When a customer has a contract expiring in November, and you can extend that for another two years by offering them an upgrade in July, you’re probably going to retain him or her.
The 20-month upgrade remains from now through essentially the end of August. Customers who have contracts expiring in January, 2014, are the first affected. Those customers would be eligible for a 20-month upgrade in September, but instead will be the first group to wait that extra four months. Those who have contracts expiring up to December 31, 2013, can still upgrade four months before contract expiration. But that means they’ll have to wait 28 months for their next upgrade.
Also part of the announcement: all New Every Two credits will disappear into the ether this Sunday, April 15th. We knew this was coming for a long time; Verizon killed the program in January, 2011 — coincidentally the same month they announced the iPhone for their network. Chances are eligible customers have used these credits by now, but there are surely some who have not.
In the end this represents a slight inconvenience for customers who have contracts expiring after January 2014. When Verizon did away with early upgrades, the switch to a 20-month upgrade cycle helped considerably. Now that they’re back to the standard 24-month cycle, and still don’t allow people to upgrade even a day early, they’re going to have a lot of frustrated customers.
Via Phone Scoop.
Joe Pawlikowski is the Senior Editor at MobileMoo.com and has been covering the mobile industry full time since 2007. When he’s not writing about the tech scene, he can be found discussing his personal love – baseball (and more specifically the New York Yankees) as well as writing on his personal blog.
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Article source: http://mobilemoo.com/news/carrier-news/verizon-news/want-to-upgrade-your-verizon-phone-youll-have-to-wait-four-months-2/
Five Tip Friday – BlackBerry 10 Security Tips
On deck this week…. Five tips I like to share whenever I’m asked about security on a BlackBerry 10 smartphone!
1. Device Password
Considering the amount of personal information stored on our smartphones, enabling password protection is something I cannot help but recommend. I’ve lost my phone once and thankfully someone sent it back to me. But the experience made me realize one thing – a device password provides peace of mind when you can’t find your smartphone.
Follow these steps to set up a password on your BlackBerry device:
- While viewing the Home screen, swipe down from the top bezel
- Tap Settings followed by Security and Privacy and finally Device Password
- Set Device Password to On and enter your desired password
2. Message displayed on locked screen
In addition to setting a password, I encourage you to set a custom message that will appear on your screen whenever your phone is locked.
For example, I set a custom message that has my name and contact details so whoever finds my phone can contact me; ‘If found, please call (XXX-XXX-XXXX) for a reward’.
Follow these instructions to create a custom message:
- While viewing the Home screen, swipe down from the top bezel
- Tap Settings followed by Display
- Customize the Message displayed on locked screen fields
- Tap Back to save your changes
3. BlackBerry Protect
[YouTube link for mobile viewing]
All it takes is a flick of a switch on your BlackBerry 10 smartphone and you’ll be able to remotely lock, wipe, beep and/or locate your misplaced smartphone thanks to BlackBerry Protect. Check out the short video embedded above to find out why I love this feature and strongly recommend enabling it on your smartphone.
Here is how you can activate BlackBerry Protect on your smartphone:
- While viewing the Home screen, swipe down from the top bezel
- Tap Settings followed by BlackBerry Protect
- Set BlackBerry Protect to On
- Tap Back to save your changes
4. Updating Passwords
Ask yourself this very important question, when was the last time you updated the passwords that you use to access your smartphone, email accounts, social networking accounts, apps, services and more? If you can’t recall the last time you did this, stop what you are doing, look at your calendar and set some time aside to do this in the near future!
5. Media Card Encryption
Depending on what type of information you have stored on your media card, you may want to consider enabling media card encryption. This provides additional security but you need to be mindful of the fact that media card encryption is linked to your smartphone – in other words, if you remove the media card and place it into another smartphone, you will not be able to view the contents unless it was decrypted first.
Note: An encrypted media card will become inaccessible if the device is wiped. Please turn off media card encryption before performing a security wipe on your device.
- While viewing the Home screen, swipe down from the top bezel
- Tap Settings followed by Security and Privacy and finally Encryption
- Set Media Card Encryption to On
Do you have a security related tip? Leave a comment and let us know!
To learn about a feature on your BlackBerry 10 smartphone or troubleshoot an issue, there are several great options available to help. Visit http://www.blackberry.com/support for access to product manuals, how-to demos, tips and tricks, YouTube videos, support forums, knowledge base articles, Twitter support, and contact information for your region.
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Article source: http://helpblog.blackberry.com/2013/04/five-tip-friday-blackberry-10-security-tips/