Hoping you all are charging your BlackBerry devices and spare batteries ahead of time in the event of losing power in your homes.  Hurricane Irene is here, and may or may not have reached your area yet.  T-Mobile is offering some tips to customers during the storm:

• Use text messaging to communicate instead of voice calls. Text messaging has a greater success rate in getting through the network during high-usage periods.
• Keep your calls short in duration.
• Utilize Wi-Fi calling if your device has the feature. This feature takes advantage of your in-home data connection to place calls in case the cellular network is congested or down.
• Make sure your phone is fully charged prior to the storm. Consider obtaining a vehicle charger in the event of power loss.

With the new BlackBerry PlayBook OS that launched earlier this morning, it seems as though a new feature has popped up and was failed to be mentioned in the change log.  Well we were told that Bridge would work better but weren’t told that apps would work through it with no WiFi connection required.  Luis from BerryReview confirmed that Bridge can act instead of WiFi for third party apps on the PlayBook.  So now you’ll be able to enjoy your BlackBerry tablet on the road even when a WiFi connection is vacant.  No, video chat does not work, but would be cool if someone found a workaround!

I noticed on both the BlackBerry Bold 9930 and BlackBerry Torch 9810 that in the Setup menu there’s a new option called “Device Switch.”  In this menu, you get the luxury of switching BlackBerry devices by backing everything up to your memory card and then exporting it back out to your new one.  The second option is to switch through Desktop Manager where you’ll just see instructions written.

I think switching BlackBerry devices has become a big problem for a while with all the confusions that OS 5 and OS 6 had in the past.

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BBM integration is getting more and more popular everyday with third party applications since RIM officially launched the service.  It started out with a few apps including Foursquare and ScoreMobile, and now there are plenty of apps supporting it.  In BlackBerry App World (3.0 Beta), I noticed a category dedicated to BBM Connected applications.  Found it useful for seeing all apps connected, as before you pretty much had to search for them on your own or wait to hear about them on the blogs.  There are premium and free apps in the list, and I’m sure you’ll find some you didn’t know had BBM integration yet.  Check it out at App World!

One of the most frustrating things in OS 6 was not being able to control what panels you wanted on the home screen.  Sure some may feel they were all a necessity, but it’s always good to keep the option open for those who prefer to eliminate some.  Thankfully in OS 7 you can manage what panels you want.  Some may prefer the classic look with just a drop down list of all apps, while others may want to take Favorites tab out or any other.

To manage your panels, simply hit the BlackBerry menu button on the home screen and you’ll see the option called Manage Panels.  That’s what you want to click.  After that you’ll see a simple list of all the panels where you can uncheck/check what you want or don’t want there.  Easy as that.  For those already customizing their panels, which have you eliminated?

Originally, the Twitter site on the BlackBerry PlayBook was lousy.  RIM had a shortcut icon by default built into the OS you couldn’t remove for a while too making it pretty useless.  I noticed a few days ago that Twitter on the PlayBook became HTML 5 ready.  Ronen from BerryReview noticed the same too, so I guess it’s something relatively new.

So if you don’t have a Twitter client on your PlayBook, the site loads up nice enough to use, minus getting notified when you get a new tweet.  Personally I prefer using Blaq for PlayBook, but I don’t mind using the main site from time to time.

A cool feature built into BlackBerry 7 OS is the fact that you can change your default search provider for the web browser.  Once upon a time Google was default for the majority, and of course you remember Verizon pushing Bing out to all BlackBerry users a while back.  So if you want to put a specific search provider in you can.  Here’s how to do it:

1. In your web browser, hit the BlackBerry Menu button then select Options
2. Click on Manage Search Engines, then scroll up and hit New Search Engine.
3. Simply type in the name for the search provider such as Google, Yahoo!, MSN, etc.
4. For Google, type in http://www.google.com/m/search?q=%s
5. Now from there, you can default any of these search providers!

Foursquare recently updated their app to 3.1.5, and with that update it brought about a couple of fixes to minor bugs. However, there is one complaint that I have heard from a few BlackBerry Foursquare users. The issues is with the BBM 6 Social Connect, getting an error message like this one.

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So I have had quite a few people, who have asked me the same questions. “Where did my list of applications go in  Beta App World?” Being that App World 3.0 is still in beta there are probably bugs that still need to be worked out. While looking further into this, I noticed that when the “My World” option was accessed there was no applications shown in any of the categories (installed, uninstalled, or subscriptions).

After playing around in App World 3.0 for a while, I noticed that once you went into “My World” then pressed menu and “refresh list”, all your list of apps come back. Everything that is installed and uninstalled.

The latest update for the BlackBerry PlayBook and Bridge brought some really cool features. One of the features is to easily lock and unlock the bridge. Prior to this you had to either wait for your bridge to timeout and lock or disconnect your bridge connection.

You can lock the bride by simply touching the bridge icon on your status bar and pressing lock button, which automatically locks the bridge so nothing can be accessed. To unlock simply follow the same steps. No you may wonder why is this important. Well if your PlayBook gets passed around, or isn’t locked or have kids who play games on your device then you don’t want them inside your email, contacts, or even bbm’s. No need to have to disconnect your bridge and reconnect.