I love discovering all these new .mobi sites. The latest come from Dan who let me know about them last week. The Hilton.mobi and Marriott.mobi websites seem to be run by the same company. Both let you easily book a hotel and check your reservations from your browser.

Dan told me that these were both great bookmarks since he gets caught with layovers from work all the time and needs to find a last minute hotel.

If your the type who would reserve a room from your BlackBerry then head on over to www.hilton.mobi or www.marriott.mobi.

This one packs in more features into their product but you pay $19.95/month for the pleasure of using it. I just met with them at the Pepcom convention yesterday in Manhattan and the product looks interesting. It seems to be available for AT&T and T-Mobile on the 8300 & 8800 devices with GPS. No plans for CDMA. They did mention that they are working on a cheaper plan with less features. Still even $10 a month is a bit high for what they are offering. As a conciliation prize you do get to monitor 3 phones for the $19.95 price tag.

I do like the feature set. Its perfect for the overprotective parent. I want to meet the guy who created the teen speed trap feature. Some of the free BlackBerry location monitoring tools could learn a few things from FindWhere.

Check it out at www.findwhere.com

Features:

Speed Alerts – Great for teen or new drivers, receive a notification by email or text if your teen is driving beyond the limit that you set (or they are in a car that their friends are driving). You’ll know where, when and how fast!

No Go/Safe Zones – Also known as geo-fences, you set specified areas on a map (don’t need to know exact address) and you can set up alerts and be notified exactly when and where.

Panic Button – We don’t like to prepare for the worst but should an emergency situation occur and help is needed a panic button can be set up on your phone to alert specified recipients when assistance is needed. Great for elderly parents or additional safety for kids. (not available with iFind2000 and iFind3000 devices)

Location History – You don’t have to check location all day, everyday. Location history is available so you can see where your phone or device has been.

Auto Locate – Your location is automatically updated, no manual input needed.

Roaming Distinction – Eliminate unnecessary data charges when you are outside of your network or roaming

Motion Detection – Optimize your battery life by postponing the delivery of your location until you are on the move again.

Frequency Settings – Control how often your location information is delivered.

Always Locate – Even if GPS fails, the location of your mobile devices can still be known.

I had never heard of this service before meeting the guys at Pepcom. Buzzd has managed to create a real time crowd sourced Zagat guide. Essentially they collect data about what is happening in certain cities from the likes of Time Out, City Search, Flavorpill, Zagat, and others. They then correlate that data with users who say that a party is actually hot by “buzz-ing” it on their mobile website. You then just look up your area and you find out where you should be headed to.

It has some real cool features according to their rep that I was talking to. They allow you to import your Facebook contacts so that you can find out what your friends are doing. He also told me that they have a homescreen shortcut for BlackBerry. On a side note he did mention that the homescreen shortcut could send GPS or cell tower location to their website but I had never heard of such a feature.

It is currently available in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, and London.

Let me know if you try it out. The major downside with these crowd sourced applications is the chicken before the egg ~ crowd before the source problem. Hopefully it will take off. It looks like a pretty cool idea and so far it seems like users in Manhattan are starting to use it.

Check it out by heading to www.buzzd.com or www.buzzd.com/m from your berry.

BoyGenius is reporting that due to heat and battery life issues, the Bold has been pushed off on AT&T. He said that he spoke to two AT&T execs who confirmed the fact that the Bold is still not carrier certified by AT&T.

I just got a bit depressed…

I guess this will remain a tease for now:

I know you might remember when we first mentioned Repligo Reader back during WES. Well their public beta that we told you to sign up for is now live. If you “forgot” to sign up for the beta you can still sign up at this link.

Cerience kindly gave us their permission to post some screenshots of the Repligo Product. I have to say I am thoroughly impressed with the application. It is very powerful and really lets you play with PDF files that are on your memory card. When we finally have native attachment downloading with BIS 2.5 (hopefully this weekend in North America) this will be even more useful.

If you have any questions feel free to ask us! Or better yet sign up for the beta yourself…

It seems like CDMA users won’t be too far behind GSM users with OS 4.5 this time around. Links to OS 4.5.0.33 for the BlackBerry 8330 & 8830 are popping up all over the web. We have already had 3 different sets of links sent in to us as tips over the last day.

I tried the 8330 OS on a Sprint 8330 and a friend tried the 8830 OS on a Verizon 8830 and both work well. There are some reports on the 8830 having voice quality issues.

Just as an example of how easy these OS 4.5 links are to find:

8830 CDMA – 8830CDMA_Public_4.5.0_rel48_4.5.0.33.exe

8330 CDMA – 8330CDMA_Public_4.5.0_rel48_4.5.0.33.exe

NOTE: I would not recommend installing these OSs on your Berry if you don’t know what you are doing. Even if you do these may cause problems!!!

Rollin just let me know that eVeek has released two hot (& ice cold) themes based on Final Fantasy. If Final Fantasy is your thing these themes look really good. Especially the blue one which would look good with other backgrounds. The icons are custom and have some cool effects on them. The top bar is very clean and sharp especially in the blue theme.

Theme is available free from eVeek but you must register to download them. Check out the themes at these links: 8100 – 8800 – 8300

Vlingo powered Yahoo OneSearch for BlackBerry a bit back and now they are going solo. They are offering a free service that lets you control your BlackBerry through voice.  According to them it lets you “send emails and text messages, search the Web, open applications (BlackBerry, Calendar, BlackBerry, Maps, etc.), dial their phones, look up contacts and even send notes to themselves.

Video demo below provided by Vlingo:

Pretty cool if your into voice control. I can see it useful for when I am driving but otherwise I would rather stick to my QWERTY keypad. Let me know what you think!

Check out the press release at this link
Check out the video demo at this link
Download the application free at this link

UPDATE: Bull’s attempt at using Vlingo:

hello everyone i’m using vlingo write this message you it works slightly ok when pretty this note to self or are short message but when writing email so dictation flat out socks i don’t like and will so play with it and see what to things

*** Composed by vlingo - http://www.vlingo.com