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So, Joe made a post this morning about how the BlackBerry 9000 will reportedly not have a touchscreen after reading a post about the leaked pictures of the model at Electronista. Electronista reported:

A photo allegedly taken near the company’s Waterloo, Canada campus reveals a device that offers a major redesign of the BlackBerry Curve but retains the chief formula equipped with a conventional screen, it also keeps the trackball of the earlier model but includes larger, easier to hit keys on its keypad and is thinner overall than its predecessors.

Read the rest of Fake BlackBerry or not? You decide……

A question that we get fairly frequently is about adding custom ringtones and pictures to specific people in your address book for the BlackBerry 8800 series. For instance (totally true story) for some of my extended family members, the Green Acres theme song is their ringtone (and a totally long story). One of my best friends has “Smooth Criminal” for his ringtone with a picture of the two of us together at an event last year (trust me, the song definitely fits).

Being able to customize your address book is pretty cool. Not only does it make it easy to know who is calling, it also makes it easy to know who to ignore as well (not that we’re advocating that of course).
Read the rest of Adding Custom Ringtones and Pictures to Address Book Entries…

The good news: The BlackBerry 9000 does offer some nice upgrades over the 8800. The bad news: It’s not touch screen. Or at least that’s according to rumors. The screen will stay the same, though the keyboard will get bigger buttons. The trackball stays, and the device is a bit thinner than its ancestors. According to a leak, most employees at Research In Motion don’t have knowledge of a touchscreen in use. After the jump, we’ll get you a leaked picture of the new model.
Read the rest of No touchscreen for the 9000?…

Welcome back everybody, for the fourth edition of Feed Reader Fridays here at BBGeeks.com. Every Friday we will be bringing you a new review of a BlackBerry based RSS reader, in the hopes that we may ultimately help you decide which feed reader will suit your needs most.

This week we will be taking a look at the NewsFlash RSS reader published by TwistSoft.

The NewsFlash RSS reader carries a $9.50 USD price tag but is available for trial download
Read the rest of NewsFlash Feed Reader Review…

Are you jealous of T-Mobile BlackBerry Pearl users, who get to choose from a number of colors? Sick of your gray or black BlackBerry? Colorware, a company that, well, colors your electronic devices, will offer the service for BlackBerry smartphones starting on December 31. This adds to their arsenal, which includes the iPhone and the Sidekick, in addition to other devices like iPods, laptops, and more.
Read the rest of Spice up your BlackBerry with some color…

Have you ever been on a business trip and found yourself without a wifi connection for your laptop? Yes, free wifi can be found in almost all hotel/motel rooms these days, but service outages and other factors can still come into play, leaving you with no connectivity and no way to get the days work from your laptop into the hands of your team back home. Luckily for you BlackBerry owners, there is another great option available. Of course I am referring to the fact that you can use your BlackBerry as a modem during times of limited or non existent wifi access.
Read the rest of The idiot’s guide to using your BlackBerry as a modem…

You know those ergonomic keyboards that are split down the middle? According to a patent filed this month by Research In Motion, the company is seemingly planning to take this technology to their BlackBerry line. This would be an effort to reduce what is termed as Blackberry Thumb (or Gamer’s Thumb, for you video game addicts). The thumbs are not meant for such rigorous movements as tapping out 30 emails in a sitting.
Read the rest of RIM to create angular keyboard?…

First things first - a lot of publications are reporting this as the first BlackBerry store or the first RIM authorized store (including our own based on a quote in the Detroit News). That’s not quite the case.

While the brand new Farmington Hills, Michigan location is the only BlackBerry store in existence at the time of this writing, it is actually the fourth BlackBerry specific store to open in history – with the other three now defunct locations having been in Toronto, London and Charlotte. The original three stores had near mirror offerings and appeal according to published reports describing them.
Read the rest of The inside scoop on the new BlackBerry Store…

There was a time, not so long ago, that the usage of Hosted BlackBerry Exchanges was pretty predictable. Small and even medium-sized businesses, not wanting to allocate a significant portion of their budget to IT, outsourced their hosting. Large businesses, on the other hand, tended to run their Exchange and BES operations in-house, paying for both equipment and staff, and why not? They would incur significant cost for outsourcing such a large operation, so they might as well have hosted operations in-house, allowing them more precise control.

You might have noticed that much of the preceding paragraph was in the past tense. That’s because the game is changing. An emerging trend is for large businesses to outsource their BlackBerry hosting services, rather than run the operation in-house. This is going hand-in-hand with businesses turning to hosting services for their Exchange servers.
Read the rest of Are big businesses turning to outsourced Hosted BlackBerry Exchanges?…

Welcome back everyone to our third installment of the Feed Reader Friday series, where we are introducing the various feed reading options available to BlackBerry owners. If you have not been keeping up, please take a minute to check out our reviews of the FreeNews reader and NewsGator Go applications.

This week we present to you the Viigo RSS Reader.

The Viigo RSS reader can be downloaded here. You will be given the option of sending the link to your BlackBerry via email or SMS.

Alternately you can download the Viigo RSS reader right to your BlackBerry by pointing your browser at the following URL: http://mobile.virtualreach.com/cgi/OTA/download.php
Read the rest of Viigo 2.70 Feed Reader Review…