On Monday, September 27th, RIM made an announcement that we had been expecting for some time. They unveiled their new tablet. We had speculated a couple months ago that this was coming and had thought we might see them name it the BlackPad. Fortunately, they went another direction, naming it the PlayBook.

I have to admit, I was surprised at what I saw with the device. RIM seems to have fallen a little behind the times of late with their hardware and lagging OS, but the PlayBook seems like a pretty nice leap ahead for them. The OS is not your typical BlackBerry operating system. This device will employ the BlackBerry Tablet OS designed and created by QNX which was recently acquired by RIM.

In what appears to be a move to bolster declining sales and market share, RIM has introduced the new BlackBerry Torch 9800 as a part of its smartphone lineup.

The Torch 9800 is a first in a couple of areas.  To start, it is the first BlackBerry with a slide keyboard.  The keyboard slides out in portrait mode extending the phone much as the Palm Pre did.  This allows the user to make use of the phone in landscape mode with a full QWERTY keyboard styled exactly like what you’re used to seeing from BlackBerry.

There’s been a lot of talk and speculation about a potential tablet launch from Research In Motion (RIM), the makers of the Blackberry.  It’s been hard to tell if this was just a rumor or if there was some legitimacy to the stories that have been circulating about a Blackberry companion tablet device.  I guess it makes a lot of sense when you consider that the tech world is pretty tablet focused right now.

Wednesday, there was some news that refreshed the RIM tablet rumors when it was discovered and quickly circulated that RIM has registered the domain www.blackpad.com.  When you visit the site, you get a blank white page without any content, but also without any redirect or errors.  Hmmm…..

Image provided by Amazon.com

Monday the 28th of June, marks another big release for Kindle as they have finally made their Kindle reading app a reality for Android users.  Many Android users have been calling for this app as handheld mobile devices become more and more popular for reading.

On April 11, 2010, we did a review on the Kindle app for iPhone in which we really sang the app’s praises as a way to turn your phone into a portable, ebook reader that makes reading fun and potentially even quicker than reading a normal book.  The key with Kindle as an app is that it presents a smaller screen size where the reader is less distracted by smaller amounts of text allowing them to focus on what they are reading and get from one page to the next page more quickly.

Welcome back to another week of Top iPhone Apps.  This week we’re bringing you a review of one of the top five rated free apps in the App Store, iBooks.

We want to make each of our standard segments as useful as possible, but need your feedback to provide the best and most helpful content possible.  If you have any specific apps or categories of apps that you’d like us to review, please leave us a comment with your feedback.  We want to hear from you.

Image provided by smartphonenation.com

Skype has always been a useful program because it gives you so many ways to stay in touch with people.  Options include calls from computer to computer, computer to landline, mobile phone to computer, mobile phone to mobile phone, instant message from computer to computer and mobile phones.  Of course the mobile phones have to be an iPhone, Android phone or a Blackberry and must have the Skype app installed.

The smartphone war in the U.S. is heating up and market share is closer than it’s ever been.    The giants that are jockeying for the #1 spot are Research In Motion (RIM) who manufactures the Blackberry OS, Android, the newest smartphone operating system created by Google, and of course Apple’s iPhone OS.

Those of us that have been paying some attention to the world of technology have probably heard all about the battle going on between Apple and Adobe over the use of Flash on Apple devices such as the iPad and the iPhone.  Apple and more specifically, Steve Jobs are against using Flash on their devices.  Among other reasons, Jobs suggests that Flash uses software to decode video which is a larger drain on battery life than if hardware were used.  He says that a mobile device that uses hardware to decode video can play video for twice as long as a mobile device that uses software to decode video before the battery runs out.