I updated my PlayBook to OS 2.0 once it was pushed out yesterday evening. It was exciting watching the download and installing bar progressing and watching the PlayBook restarts itself.
I am no stranger to the User Interface (UI) of 2.0. As i have loaded the beta version to give it a try much earlier before. Most features, has already been showcased by Research in Motion (RIM) at CES 2012 a month back. So not much of a surprise there, until you try out the applications for yourself.
They took the idea of a simple emails, calendars, and contacts and gave it a new life. Integrated it with popular social networking platforms like, facebook, twitter, and linkedin. Your email app is now integrated with whichever service you have, and presented in an unified inbox. You can even post to twitter and facebook directly from the app itself. Calendar has pretty much the same treatment. Within the calendar app itself, you can view the consolidated profile of the person you are meeting with directly in the app itself, making it easy to know more about the person you are meeting. Instead of having to go to contacts, facebook, twitter or other cyber stalking techniques to learn more about the person you are meeting. This brings us to my favourite app among the 3, the contacts app. This is where the contacts are consolidated. It pulls information from google contacts, facebook friends, people you follow on twitter, and probably Linkedin too. It is simple brilliant. All the contact’s detail and social networking profiles all in a single location, also it pulls in the about me section from the social network so that when viewing the contact you can have a description of the person. I know its a little hard to picture this right now, but if you have seen it live, you would know what I mean. The social integration within the native PIM apps are just brilliant, with social networking become a most part of people’s life now. It makes sense for it to be in their contacts too. So when you want to contact someone, you can have all the ways to contact them in one view. No matter phone, email, address, twitter, facebook or linkedin. I’ve used it for 5 minutes and I’m sold. Though one downside would be those accounts from the same person with different account names, you would then have to manually link them together. Honestly, why cant some people just use their real name or even abbreviations on things like facebook and twitter? It makes linking accounts much easier.
Since there is no way of currently syncing contacts, calendar, over to the playbook on the mac. I have decided to sync my address book to google contacts. Which when i set up an account on my playbook, it populates my entire contacts over as well.
These are just a couple of things that are new with OS 2.0, i dont have the energy to cover all of them in a single post, and i still find it irritating to include image links in a post like that. But anyway, things are definitely looking good for the new BB10 phones later this year!
The unified contacts application probably comes from the acquisition of Gist by RIM. Gist is a contact management app with social integrations too. Its available on current iOS, Android and BlackBerry devices if one is so keen. I, for one am rather tempted to try Gist on my BlackBerry right now.
Oh, by the way. Sad news of the day. I noticed even prior to doing the OS update that my PlayBook refuses to be charged past 84%. So i though i would drain it completely and try charging again. After i did the update, i spent hours trying to drain it down to 0 (battery life is pretty good on the playbook). After it turned itself off with an empty battery. I charged the device for almost 4-5 hours. Only to turn it on and see 24% on it. Tried to kept charging, but it just stayed at 24% after half an hour. So, sadly its now in the repair centre now. Probably just a faulty battery, but it wont be back for at least a week. Just when i was getting into plants vs zombies, and cut the ropes. haha. well, lets hope Zinio releases soon, so when i receive my playbook back, i can start reading my magazines.
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