Research In Motion has launched a new technology that allows employees to use personal BlackBerry smartphones for professional use, or in turn the company-owned smartphones for personal use.

This new technology, called as BlackBerry Balance, will thus allow businesses to secure, manage and control confidential company or client information on these devices. This also helps employees to maintain their privacy.

“BlackBerry Balance is a win-win for employers and employees,” said Jim Tobin, senior vice president, software and services at RIM.

He added, “It’s a secure and cost-effective way for companies to keep employees connected and productive, while also allowing the flexibility for employees to carry a single phone.”

BlackBerry Balance presents a unified view of work and personal content on a BlackBerry smartphone while keeping the content separate and secure. The division between work and personal content is transparent to the user unless they try to perform actions prohibited by company policy.

IT administrators can set policies via BlackBerry Enterprise Server or BlackBerry Enterprise Server Express.

These policy settings can enable secure access to business information while preventing the information from being copied into, sent from or used by personal applications like Facebook, Twitter, Hotmail, GMail or Yahoo! Mail accounts.

This function will also prevent business data or files created by business applications to be used by personal applications. If a user attempts an action that is prohibited by IT policy, a notification is displayed on the device.

The best part of it is that if an employee leaves the organisation or if the device is stolen, an administrator can remotely wipe business information (also personal information in case of stolen device) from the device while leaving personal information intact.

It is available only on BlackBerry devices and can be applied to employee or company-owned smartphones. It is built into BlackBerry Enterprise Server 5.0.3 and BlackBerry Enterprise Server Express 5.0.3 (available this week) for Microsoft Exchange or IBM Lotus Domino. It also requires the latest version of BlackBerry 6 Device Software.

Blackberry 6 OS is currently available in all new Blackberry phones. If you are using device with older OS, you can always update it to the Blackberry 6 (supported in all the newer Blackberry phones, for older phone you will need to check if the update is available).

Spice Mobility, which is focusing on internet ready mobiles, will launch India’s first dual SIM Android phone this week.

Dilip Modi, managing director, Spice Mobility, said to ‘The Mobile Indian’, “In this week we will launch MI 270, India’s first Android based dual SIM phone. It will have a number of pre-loaded free applications to address the digital lifestyle of youth, and it will be priced at around Rs 9,000.”

He further said, “MI 270 will be a dual camera phone based on Android 2.1. It will have a 3.7 inch capacitive screen. The phone will have a Chipset from Media Tek and will have Processor speed of 600 MHz.”

The new device is to be available across the country at Spice Hotspots and other retail chains.

Meanwhile, Spice Mobility plans to provide affordable Android devices to Indian consumers to surf the net. At present, around 27 per cent of total mobile users in India use the internet on their handsets and by 2015 the figure will have swollen to around 75 per cent.

Currently, Spice has two Android devices, Spice Mi-300 and Spice Mi-310.

Mi-300 is an Android 2.1 based phone with an 8 cm capacitive touchscreen. It has support for 3.5G and HSPA. The handset has a 5 mega Pixel camera, Wifi, GPS and AGPS. It also has Google Messaging service with push mail.

Spice Mi-310 is based on Android 2.2 (Froyo) operating system. The touchscreen phone has GPS, AGPS and Wifi hotspot functionality that can support up to five Wifi enabled devices.

With Mother’s Day round the corner, Nokia is planning to launch a limited edition N8 smartphone in pink colour.

The new limited edition N8 is not just a repainted, beatified version of the older version but it gets an all new operating system as well, the Symbians Anna.
Sources in Nokia India have confirmed that the limited edition N8 was supposed to be launched this month but due to delay in shipments it will be now available in Indian market later this month or earlier next month.

The Anna operating system was announced by Nokia sometime back and it brings both visual and performance changes over the existing Symbian ^3 OS.

Nokia has tried to make it as women centric as possible and have specially added a Little Pink Diva theme in this device for spicing up the menus a little bit. Along with that, the clock too has been replaced with a Pink Neon Clock.

Last but not the least, the N8 pink will also come with the ELLE fashion App preinstalled which keeps you up-to-date with the latest fashion, beauty and celebrity news.

At a time when 3G has just taken off and more and more handset players are focusing on internet enabled mobiles, Spice Mobility too has announced that it will focus on internet ready devices.

B.K. Modi, chairman, Spice Mobility, announcing the switch towards internet ready phones, said, “The Indian youth has moved away from the basics of roti, kapda and makaan. They now need mobile internet to be fully productive. It is our duty to support the Indian government in making the country internet literate and remove the digital divide.”

Modi further said, “We will be focusing on devices running on Android (operating system) and supported by Chipset from Media Tek.”

He further elaborated Spice’s plans to offer affordable Android devices to Indian consumers to surf the net. At present, around 27 per cent of total mobile users in India use the internet on their handsets and by 2015, the figures will have swollen to around 75 per cent.

However, this will happen only if mobile users have access to affordable internet-ready handsets.

On prices, Modi said, “We will launch devices in the range of Rs 5,000 to Rs 10,000 so that people from different strata of society can buy them.”

Currently, Spice has two Android phones, Spice Mi-300 and Spice Mi-310.

Mi-300 is an Android 2.1 phone with an 8 cm capacitive touchscreen. It supports 3.5G and HSPA. The handset has a 5 mega Pixel camera, Wifi, GPS and AGPS. It also has Google Messaging service with push mail.

Spice Mi-310 is based on Android 2.2 (Froyo) operating system. It is a touchscreen phone with GPS, AGPS and Wifi hotspot functionality that allows users to connect five handsets to share their data connection.

Meanwhile, apart from North India where it has a good market share, Spice also plans to strengthen its position and improve its visibility in other regions of the country. To do so it will also create seven clusters in Delhi, Kolkata, Jaipur, Bhugneshwar, Mumbai, Bangalore and Chennai.

Motorola is planning to bring more Atrix-laptop doc like device in future, which could be available to the users as an alternative for tablets and especially iPads.

“In the Android ecosystem, there is a need for us to differentiate. Atrix devices with the Webtop and lap-dock we really think there is an alternative way of viewing the convergence between mobility and computing. And we will continue to focus on that,” says the Motorola chief executive officer Sanjay Jha.

One more idea being pursued by the company is to allow the phone to access a quad core Processor in the lapdock so it can perform better. It’s not that the laptop is going to be dead, but some interesting and creative variations are definitely taking shape.

The Motorola Atrix is the first such smartphone to come with an accessory like laptop dock that turns the device into a netbook. But it did not perform well as users felt the price was too high for an accessory for the phone.

Other problems with the lapdock were its choice of operating system.

However, there are some positive aspects of the lapdock as well. It has a full laptop Browser and not a mobile one. Two USB ports are there as well, so users could connect external keyboard and mouse.

Nokia phones, especially the feature phones of yesteryears, were known for their sturdy build quality and long battery life. And perhaps for this reason that it used to command 70 per cent market share couple of years back.

Most of us, who have at some point owned a Nokia phone, have our own stories of how it survived after we dropped it or it got washed in the washing machine hiding in our pants pocket and so on.

But the stories that we are taking about is much worse and even Nokia never anticipated that its phones will survive in such situations.

The first story is about Karin, who lost her Nokia 3110 Classic about a year ago. A year later, her daughter found the phone buried in the flowerbed. Initially Karin didn’t think her phone would work. Then her sister suggested the phone “has to work because it’s a Nokia”.

One battery charge and the 3110 Classic sprang sharply back to life!

Another story is about a year older. A Nokia 1600 phone, belonging to one Andrew Cheatle, fell near a sea shore. He was resigned to the fact that it had been swept away and lost in the big blue sea.

However, a week later it was discovered in the stomach of a sizable cod (fish) by a fisherman Glen Kerley, who returned it to Cheatle. To his amazement, the phone after some cleaning worked perfectly fine!

Though Andrew had to change the circuit board but the handset was still able to make calls, which is a great handset survival story.

This is a story from India, of a farmer who had to extract his phone from a pile of buffalo dung. The phone, having previously been eaten by a buffalo, went missing for a few days after falling out of the farmer’s shirt pocket. What is surprising is that the phone was ringing while inside buffalo’s tummy!

Around same time as the buffalo and fish story, another Nokia phone, this time a Nokia 6800, was found inside a pack of potato chips! Though it could not be switched on immediately, the phone was very much intact (may be battery would have drained out completely).

These stories found on the Nokia’s official blogs, are just a few examples. These are so many stories listed in the comments section on the blog. We would be happy if we can have our own examples from India in our comments space, it could be about any phone any company.