BlackBerry has not had a great time this past month. The device manufacturer faced quite the truck load of criticism and down-right discredit for their recent service outage that spanned across major regions of NorthAmerica, Europe, Middle East and Africa.

Aside from that, today marks Day 2 of BlackBerry Developer Conference Americas. The event is being held in San Fransisco in the USA and has attracted developers interested in the BB OS platform that currently runs the BlackBerry smart phones as well as the BlackBerry PlayBook, a tablet produced by their device manufacturer RIM.

BlackBerry developers and enthusiasts will now get to interact with a new mobile platform announced today called the BBX which is a mixture of the BlackBerry OS and QNX, a commercial Unix-like realtime operating system primarily used in embedded systems.

QNX is said to assist in combining the best of both worlds to give a full-on experience for users on the BlackBerry service as well as the devices aligned with RIM. Read more »

Have you ever wanted a tablet you can open using your signature? YES?? Then you will looooove this.

Introducing the Fusion Garage Grid 10.

At 47,405KES and 42,450KES for a 16GB model the pricing suffers from the same delusions that afflicted BBplaybook and HP Tablet but at least  Fusion Garage is in good company.

Just like with the Blackberry though, Fusion Garage is hoping on a post-iOS, post-Android gag reflex to drive consumers into its arms.

To entice customers, Fusion Garage has created a unique OS on top of the Android Linux kernel that behaves very differently from the tablet user interfaces we’ve seen so far.

The tablet features an Nvidia Tegra 2 dual-core 1.2GHz processor with 512MB of RAM. Integrated storage is limited to 16GB, but can be expanded using microSD cards. The screen resolution is a whopping 1,366×768 pixels (ideal for HD content).

We have a winner!!

The BlackBerry Playbook becomes the first ever tablet to be certified by the U.S. Government as a good quality of service and data security capable device.

In a statement release, RIM announced that:

“RIM is pleased to announce that the BlackBerry PlayBook is the first tablet approved under FIPS for use within the U.S. federal government,” said Scott Totzke, Senior Vice President, BlackBerry Security at Research In Motion. “This certification demonstrates our continued commitment to meeting the needs of security-conscious organizations and enables the U.S. federal government to buy with confidence knowing that the PlayBook meets their computing policy requirements for protecting sensitive information.

More to follow.

BlackBerry world Conference kicked off on the 3^rd of May, 2011 in Orlando Florida.

Some of the major highlights of the keynote were;

1. New exciting apps to roll out including Angry Birds – A puzzle video game developed by Finland based Rovio Mobile, inspired by a sketch of stylized wingless birds initially rolled out on the Apple’s iPhone. The App has now been ported to RIM devices and this will thankfully make a lot of game chasers very happy.

2. RIM was also joined to Adobe® – which has more than 3 million active developers who have done a lot of great things with Adobe to enable the development of high performance mobile apps for the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet. Read more »

London, UK and Waterloo, ON – Research In Motion (RIM) (NASDAQ: RIMM; TSX: RIM) and 7digital announced that the 7digital Music Store will come pre-installed* on the BlackBerry® PlayBook™.

The 7digital Music Store to be pre-installed on the BlackBerry PlayBook at launch in the US and Canada with further international roll out in 2011 with the purpose of letting users browse, preview and purchase tracks from a catalogue of over 13 million MP3s.

The 7digital Music Store will enable BlackBerry PlayBook users to access 7digital’s catalogue of over 13 million high quality (320kbps) MP3s. BlackBerry PlayBook users will be able to search for tracks, albums and artists and preview tracks before making a purchase. Users can also discover new music through 7digital’s recommendation technology. Read more »

There’s been a lot of noise in the late 2010 and early 2011 about who is creating what to battle the Apple iPad.

Here’s a list of what we think are the most worthy opponents:

1 – Motorola Xoom: The first in its class to host dual-processing capabilities and is the debut choice for Android’s Honeycomb (Android Version 3.0) and is loaded with a whooping 1GHz dual-core Tegra 2 will power this 11 inch device. Read more »