That’s it.  We officially have a very confusing series.  The Bold family is just as confusing as the Curve family, only worse.  So RIM doesn’t want to discourage current Tour users by calling it the Tour 9650, so they flip the name to the famous Bold to attract everyone.  In reality, this 9650 is a Tour cosmetically and at heart.  Nothing about it is Bold, and we are all unhappy about this new addition.  The image above comes from a leaked user guide found over at CrackBerry for the BlackBerry Bold 9650, not Tour, not Tour2 but BOLD.  The link is dead now as this was released late last night, but now you know.

-by Otoniel Bruno

Over at the Official BlackBerry Blog, we found that MyBlackBerry has gone through some major official changes today.  For those unaware, MyBlackBerry is an official forum/social network by RIM made for BlackBerry users, giving you the opportunity to get more familiar with your device and connect with other users like you.

Firstly, RIM mentions languages.  The MyBlackBerry team is looking to extend its language support beyond English, to reach out to its users all over the globe.  This is something they are still working on at the moment but will be coming soon.

Now as for the changes, the whole layout has been transformed as mentioned earlier and definitely has a more user friendly interface.

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In the latest BlackBerry Newsletter, RIM lets us know that the Twitter and LinkedIn applications are coming soon.  Ronen from BerryReview brings up a funny point as RIM exemplifies Twitter as a business app which i found hilarious myself.  I’m already using Twitter for BlackBerry, but I’d still like to see more improvements in the final build.  As for the LinkedIn application, I’m very excited to give this one a test drive, hopefully it’s savvy and not so much laggy.

-by Mac Jadalhack

UPDATE: It seems to be still not working for many, but at the same time, a lot are still messaging away on BBM back and forth, as more of my buddies on my list are appearing active now again.

Our buddy Mac Chebli let us know that there is a BlackBerry outage in town today.  Yes we could of figured this out on our own, but I haven’t been using my BlackBerry for the past half hour or so, and none of the other writers seemed to report this! So here we go again, with another outage.  My browser seems to be working on my AT&T Bold 9700 and my Verizon Curve 8530.  It looks like BlackBerry Messenger is well down but working here and there strangely.  If you’re having a problem in your area drop us a line!

-by Mac Jadalhack

There’s a lot of regulations in Saudi Arabia, as the government keeps close guard over its citizens and things they can and can’t do.  Camera phones have been an issue there, and are still as the government has tried putting bans on those as well in the past.  Now the next biggest thing is BlackBerry.  Lots of Saudi citizens are getting hooked on the device just as we are.  The CITC has just asked Research In Motion to allow carriers to regulate and monitor BlackBerry Messenger sent and received messages.  “RIM operates in more than 170 countries around the world and respects the regulatory requirements of governments,” said a company statement. “RIM is investigating the reported matter in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and will provide an update once further information is available to share.”

-by Otoniel Bruno

Source: Arab News

Image Source

The EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa) are scheduled to get their BIS 3.0 upgrade this coming weekend on March 14th.  As you all know, the biggest deal about BIS 3.0 is the two way Gmail sync which we are very excited to see.  North America will be getting the upgrade a week or so after so stay tuned for that.

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Having issues with your BlackBerry Storm2? Of course there are a lot of improvements when referring back to the original first generation Storm.  But users are still having issues with dead spots and occasional “dead clicks.” What I mean by dead clicks is pushing down on the screen or button without getting a click or response at all.  I personally experienced it before, and it definitely is no fun to have.  So according to BBLeaks, RIM is going to be issuing BlackBerry Storm2 devices with new and improved screens.  Hit the jump to check out official details.

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This isn’t exactly the latest news here, but here’s an interesting page we came across on the official BlackBerry website all about Law Enforcement Solutions with the mobile device.  There’s lots of useful information here, including quite a few webinars you can register for.  One occurred yesterday called “Fingerprinting In The Field” which covered field fingerprinting, enabling officers to be able to identify criminals and suspects on the spot.  We’d love to see more hands on with what law enforcement applications and services are out there for BlackBerry, but it looks like these aren’t pushed so much out there to the general public.  Next thing you know we’d have apps allowing you to do background checks leaked all over the web!

• Check out BlackBerry Law Enforcement Solutions >>
  

-by Collin Sorp

Mobile banking is one of the most convenient activities for me.  Given that I do not use CHASE, I am a little bit dissapointed that I won’t have the same enjoyment all you account holders will have.  Ronen from BerryReview got an email from CHASE which basically said that a BlackBerry application will be coming soon.  As it is marked for “early 2010,” we can expect to see this roll out any time soon.  Who’s up for it?

-by Otoniel Bruno

The blog are all reporting there was and maybe still is an outage with Verizon’s data network.  My second BlackBerry is a Verizon 8530 and I haven’t had any issues all morning.  Not on WiFi or anything like that and I was definitely using BBM.  I asked some fellow New York residents who happen to have Verizon too and they haven’t had anything this past hour.  Is the outage done?  Who had one to begin with?

-by Mac Jadalhack