BlackBerry News From The Wire for the week of 4/4/2011

With the PlayBook launch less than two weeks away, I figured we’d see plenty of material this week. While that’s true — we got plenty of BlackBerry previews — there was very little involving the forthcoming tablet. I haven’t even seen much marketing material on TV, which seems odd, too. In fact, the only story from the PlayBook this week was of the negative type.

Did the iPad cause a PlayBook delay?

Since the PlayBook’s announcement last fall, we’d been hearing that RIM was eyeing a first quarter 2011 release. That’s vague enough that it usually won’t cause any stirs. But when they finally announced the release date, it was decidedly in the second quarter. So what gives? Was it a delay, or was Q1 just a guideline, and April 19th close enough? There was a report from a Taiwanese publication, found on Apple Insider, that suggests the iPad might have caused the slight delay. The second iteration of the Apple tablet is in great demand, with many outlets sold out within an hour of the on-sale date. Apple has needed many, many more displays to fulfill demand. This, the publication alleges, left a lower inventory for RIM due to a “shortage of touch panels because Apple already book up most of the available capacity.” It would be a shame if that were indeed the case, but it’s no fault of RIM’s. Apple is known to — as Apple Insider put it — “pre-pay for components in order to guarantee priority and favorable pricing.” That’s something you can do when you have the following that Apple does. Tip of the Week: Completing your BlackBerry contact cards. There are so many things you can link to your contacts, such as Twitter, Facebook and BBM. Take advantage for a complete address book.

Taking a look at the BlackBerry Bold Touch

It was only a matter of time before we got some preview material for the BlackBerry Bold Touch, the long-awaited QWERTY/touchscreen hybrid. N4BB has a ton of videos that show off some of the features. It’s tough not to get excited for this one. We can only hope they make the announcement at BlackBerry World.

Checking out BBM 6.0

That’s a little preview of what’s to come with the new BlackBerry Messenger 6.0, which should be dropping with OS 6.1. That is, probably some time this summer. CrackBerry has this image and more, though there’s really not much revealed. You can see that there are some new symbols for display names, and you can change the message color. But we’ve yet to see any substantive improvements. All in due time, I suppose. In the meantime we’ll feast on little tidbits like this, just because we can.

Roundup

• As a follow up to last week’s graph, which showed that OS 6 was only on 10 percent of devices, Kyle from BlackBerry Cool shows us that 41 percent of paid apps from App World are for OS 6. So the active usage is relatively high.
• Here’s a nice breakdown of the PlayBook file system layout.
• Psyched for NFC payments? So am I. Here’s another use: picture tagging.