For PlayBook owners, OS 2.0; for BlackBerry smartphone owners, BlackBerry Remote

RIM promised BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0 in February, and yesterday they delivered. You probably don’t need anyone to tell you that, though, since the tablets have already received updates. Hooray. Still, RIM did make something of a splash yesterday. Along with PlayBook OS 2.0 came BlackBerry Bridge 2.0. That’s the software that allows you to connect your BlackBerry smartphone to the PlayBook (and was previously the only way to get email, calendars, and contacts on the PlayBook). It contains a pretty killer feature: your BlackBerry turns into a remote control. The video above, shot by CrackBerry’s Bla1ze, gives a quick demo of using BlackBerry Bridge not on a PlayBook, but on a Motorola Xoom. Sure, using your BlackBerry smartphone as a remote for your PlayBook would have been cool enough. But the ability to use it with any device that supports the Bluetooth HID profile is just gravy. And you know what device supports the Bluetooth HID profile? The PlayStation 3. Sony has sold more than 62 million PlayStation 3 consoles, so there are bound to be plenty of BlackBerry users with them. Remember all those times you had use the cursor to move around while entering text? Forget that. Now you can just connect your BlackBerry and use that for text input. Basically, your BlackBerry has just turned into a Bluetooth keyboard. Advantage: thumb-typing master. You can download BlackBerry Bridge 2.0 here if you have OS 5.0 or higher.

About the Author

Joe Pawlikowski is the Senior Editor at MobileMoo.com and has been covering the mobile industry full time since 2007. When he's not writing about the tech scene, he can be found discussing his personal love - baseball (and more specifically the New York Yankees) as well as writing on his personal blog.