Blackberry

The 2008 Olympics are only a few days way, and if you’re like me, you’ve got Olympic fever out the ying-yang. But if you’re also like me, you’re painfully aware that until Couch Surfing or Afternoon Napping becomes an Olympic sport, you’ll sadly never know that feeling of glory, admiration and pride as you accept that gold medal. Or, maybe you are an active person, so active in fact, that you find it hard to stay abreast of the latest, hottest Olympic stories out there. Well, you’ll be ecstatic to hear that EQO’s Go for the Gold contest has got you covered on both fronts, plus a chance to win some SWEET PRIZES!

Tell me more you say? Thanks to our awesome ability to harness the power of technology, you can now use EQO to keep up to date on the hottest and most fascinating Olympic storylines.

How does it work? It’s simple. Each day we’ll send you three exciting Olympic highlights via EQO Message (completely free to you, of course). You’ll then get to vote on your favorite story. The next day we’ll tell you which story won the Gold medal, along with three new stories.

What’s the best part? Each vote puts you closer to – OMG – winning the drawing for a brand new BlackBerry smartphone at the end of the Olympics. Each day we will also reward one of you mobile athletes with $50 worth of EQO Credits (so you can call all your buddies to rub your win in their faces).

And hey, ask not what your country can do for you. If the prizes aren’t enough motivation, you’ll also be competing for national pride as EQO rewards our very own Gold, Silver and Bronze medals to the countries that logged the most votes throughout the Olympics - EQO will fly your country’s flags on our website. Take that, <insert country name(s) you don’t like here>!

To register for the contest now, click here.

Sadly being an EQO employee I cannot take part in the competition, but much like the real Olympics, I’ll be intently following how the competition unfolds from my couch.    

Mobhappy has the 86th Carnival of the Mobilists up. They plug Wap Review's look at NewsGator's mobile version finding it tempting but sunk by showstoppers.

I would highly recommend that Dennis try Viigo Personal. Having used it on the Blackberry Pearl for some time now I consider it the best mobile newsreader I've come across. On the desktop I'm a Newsfire user. Viigo is as usable on the mobile as Newfire is on the desktop, and that is saying a lot. 

Jeff

EQO BlackBerry users, I am pleased to announce that you now have a user guide of your own. No longer will you have to settle for the Standard EQO user guide. Now you can proudly peruse the pages of your very own .pdf file. Check out the user guide here.

If you are new to EQO and you want to see all the wonders that EQO can do, check out the user guide. If you are a long time user of the application and still have no flippin' idea how to work the thing, then the user guide is probably for you too. And, if you have a BlackBerry and your use EQO, but you never learned to read, well, I guess you can just look at the pictures.

Peter
EQO Customer Support

From the Toronto Star via Engadget Mobile:

[RIM Co-CEO Balsillie] is also intensely critical of what appears to be an effort by Apple to wrest control of the customer experience in the consumer market. For example, the iPhone is being sold through Apple's own stores, instead of strictly through AT&T Inc., which signed an exclusive U.S. deal with the computer maker. The phone is free of AT&T's logo and software and is tied closely to Apple's iTunes music store, which is where subscribers will need to go to activate their phones and browse rate plans.

"It's a dangerous strategy," says Balsillie. "It's a tremendous amount of control. And the more control of the platform that goes out of the carrier, the more they shift into a commodity pipe."

This post could alternately be titled "Blackberry CEO Whispers Sweet Nothings in Operators Ears".

This is really about trying to drive a wedge between Apple and its current and potential mobile network partners. Of all the big mobile device manufacturers, RIM has the least to gain if the industry moves to a more open mobile market with weakened operators, and enjoys a very comfortable position in the current operator-dominated environment. Unlike most mobile device manufacturers, RIM derives a large chunk of their revenue from service subscriptions. They sell into the least price-sensitive segment of the mobile market - business and government users. They have gotten their current market position by providing internet services on networks with poor data capabilities.

But all of this is changing. RIM's centralized email relay infrastructure is becoming dated and their services like push email and calendaring are in danger of becoming commoditized by copycat devices and internet cloud services.

I love my Blackberry Pearl and it's a great device. But I expect I'll be even happier as an iPhone user when it arrives in Canada...

Jeff

If you are having troubles getting connected to the EQO service on your Blackberry, the likely cause is that you do not have a TCP/IP connection. This site below has connection details for all of the major Blackberry carriers and should straighten you out:

Blackberry Connection Help

EQO has just recently released its EQO Mobile J2ME software for Blackberry and Windows Mobile phones as a limited Alpha. The alpha is available by signing up at www.eqo.com and registering your phone the usual way. Please sign up, give it a shot, and let us know how it goes.

 
Chris
EQO Customer Evangelist

I have been posting on the forum and listening to comments from our community members in the few weeks since EQO launched.  In response to reactions coming from the forum we at EQO have been working hard on new features and support for more phones (EQO for Mac, Motorola, Blackberry, and Palm Treo coming in the next month or two!).  We have already added support for many more countries and carriers as per the requests of many.  Like I said in my last post, we really pay attention to what is being said in the forums so feel free to give us a piece of your mind.

Chris
EQO Customer Evangelist