I consider myself fortunate for a number of things in my life, but I also know I’m not that lucky all the time, either. And yet, in just the last two weeks, I’ve received no less than four text messages on two different smartphones telling me that I’ve won an iPhone with a link to the glorious prize. Spam has traditionally been a staple of unwanted email, but it seems text messages are catching up.

Rdio already has 15 million tracks in its catalog of streaming music, and a new deal announced earlier this week just raised that to 18 million. The numbers are only part of the story, since the bulk of the new content comes from one of the biggest repositories of independent music.

GPS navigation isn’t new, of course, but its potential with smartphones has offered an intriguing twist in the evolution of in-car navigation. Not surprisingly, the likes of TomTom, Garmin and Magellan have their own iPhone apps, and are joined by several others at varying price points. And then there’s a free one like Waze, a fully-featured app that offers turn-by-turn directions with spoken street names and crowdsourced information.

Whether you’re going on a road trip through areas with 3G coverage, or you tend to commute a lot on a daily basis, the right apps on your smartphone can help you tap into a world full of radio stations playing all the music you can imagine. The best thing about them is that they’re pretty cheap (sometimes even free) to download and don’t require any subscription costs to keep the music playing.

I have another homescreen for you today. A little bigger than an iPhone or iPod touch too. We have Gadjo Sevilla’s Blackberry Playbook to check out today. Interesting, and rather sad, device the Playbook. One of those “it could have been a contender only if…” stories. By all accounts it’s a solid device that was hampered by RIM itself. Pity. Regardless we’re here to see how someone uses one so let’s get too it.

Music streaming has never been this popular. Rdio, Slacker, Music Unlimited, Last.FM and others have already hit the Canadian market looking to cut a piece of the pie, so why not have France-based Deezer enter the mix, too? It’s been a week or so since the official launch and I got to try it out on a couple of smartphones.

Research In Motion kicked off its BlackBerry World developer and partner conference today by demoing the BlackBerry 10 operating system running on a sexy new multi-touch slate. Called the Dev Alpha device, which was handed to developers here, it is the first BlackBerry smartphone to run the new QNX-based operating system which is expected to make a big splash later on this year.

Whether you bought a BlackBerry PlayBook way back on April 19^th of last year, or if you took advantage of the recent price drops, there is good news.  The long awaited update to the BlackBerry PlayBook is finally upon us and BlackBerry PlayBook owners can now download and install the update. This update brings a number of expected features such as and updated homescreen, on device (native) Email, Calendar and Contacts apps, and also a number of unexpected but very cool features. Read on for more information about just what this update will bring, and what to expect before updating.

It was with the premise in the headline that I borrowed a Motorola Pro+ 4G, one of the most recent Android phones that closely resembles a BlackBerry. By offering a QWERTY keyboard along the same lines as a BlackBerry running on Android 2.3 Gingerbread, could that be enough to win converts away from RIM?

Why are so many people ready to trash the Blackberry Playbook?  

After all, tablets come in all shapes, sizes and fruits.  

Time to stop all the bashing and defend a great device.

It took far too long, but the angriest birds around have no slung their way onto RIM’s BlackBerry PlayBook tablet. The Angry Birds games have probably been the most popular mobile game in 2011, garnering over 500 million downloads, and now they’ve pretty much swept into all the mobile devices and operating systems around — except, of course, for BlackBerry handsets.

For RIM, seeing the end of 2011 can’t come soon enough, considering what a miserable year it’s been for the company. The launch of the PlayBook tablet was the first big move RIM made, and though it didn’t exactly wow consumers, it doesn’t mean it’s not a capable tablet.

Right now, and until December 1, Future Shop is offering the PlayBook for $300 off, making the 16GB version as low as $199.99.

Remember the BlackBerry outage last week?  Well, RIM certainly does and after working to get service restored, they are now thanking their customers for their patience during that time by offering a number of premium apps (worth a total value of more than $100) for free.  The apps include some great utilities, games and music apps, including:

• SIMS 3

• Bejeweled
• N.O.V.A.
• Texas Hold’em Poker 2
• Bubble Bash 2
• Photo Editor Ultimate
• DriveSafe.ly Pro
• iSpeech Translator Pro
• Drive Safe.ly Enterprise
• Nobex Radio™ Premium

• Shazam Encore
• Vlingo Plus: Virtual Assistant

Plus, there may be more apps to come as well.  The apps will be available for download via BlackBerry App World over the next few weeks and will be available until December 31, 2011.

Read on for the full press release from RIM, and feel free to add your comments on what you think about this offer!

If you own a BlackBerry, you'll be happy to know that your BlackBerry services should be coming back online.  While services have been down for users in Europe, the Middle East and Africa for a couple of days already, service in Canada and the US started having issues a little over 24 hours ago.  Services are now returning in all areas with many users reporting considerable improvement from this morning.  Expect some delays to continue as the backlog is cleared, but users should now be getting emails, have browser access, and should be getting BBM access again (although there are reports of delays for some users still, myself included).

If your BlackBerry is still having problems, read on for some instructions that may help get you back up and running.

I still remember the first time I heard about BlackBerry.

A friend was doing sales work for them and the fact she could read my email on a pager sized device while on a street corner blew. my. mind.  

But that was more than a decade ago.