I know there are quite a few of you out there using the free xPlayer multimedia player from SHAPE so I thought I would mention this. They have released an update this week to fix a few bugs in the media player. One of the big fixes was the annoying issue where the backlight would go off during some videos.

You can pick up the new version of xPlayer at this link.

They have also updated their xColorEvent trackball color application but that one is no longer free. The new updates include SMS events, new options, and integration with the BlackBerry address book. You can pick up the latest xColorEvent for $7 from the BerryReview store if you are interested.

Magmic has come through on their release schedule by putting out two new games today. The best part is that they have managed to get a 24 hour trial for Big Kahuna Words. This is a big step for Bplay since many previous games did not have trials. Hopefully this will pan out for more of their upcoming releases.

Big Kahuna Words – $9.99

Explore your word-making skills while traveling back to the islands of Hawaii and Polynesia.

One of the all-time best selling PC word games goes mobile! Explore your word-making skills while traveling back to the islands of Hawaii and Polynesia. Dare to dive into a world of words in this underwater puzzler. Dive between the Hammerhead Sharks and other aquatic life, breaking stone blocks with your words in an explosive twist on puzzle gameplay. Explore an almost infinite number of underwater realms and discover the might of the “Tiki Totem.” Earn rewards for your word-creation prowess in either Action or Relaxed play. Download and unearth the journey of a lifetime!

Features:

• 150 Levels included
• Discover gorgeous and exotic fish
• Two modes of play: Action or Relaxed
• Beautiful submarine seascapes and aquatic life

Sushi Mania – $7.99

The world’s bravest food snack will satisfy your hunger for adventure!

Stripped of your ingredients, robbed of your master the sushi chef – travel down the rolling hill of justice as you set the culinary world to rights in the craziest action platformer ever. Alone and unseasoned you must gather up the lost ingredients and recover the missing baby sushi rolls before the evil Menaces grab themselves a free meal. Roll, jump and spin through stunning cartoon landscapes filled with dangers, power-ups and bizarre characters. Pocket extra coins as you go and you can unlock even more features in the game that redefines the concept of fast food.

Bplay has released an interesting new line of themes relating to your Zodiac symbol. While the Zodiac is not generally my cup of tea I thought it was interesting to see Bplay stretch beyond the Icon, Today, and Zen categorization of their themes. The have added a new specialty category for these Zodiac themes with the three styles for all 12 Zodiac signs. From what I can tell the theme is available for the 8100, 8300, & 8800 series devices.

I am not the biggest fan of the bubble icons but the themes do have a nice mystical style to them. The well known theme designer Cherri Chiodo has designed these themes for Bplay so they should be very well rounded out. The text is actually a very nice cartoony style that i like but the blue title bars in the today screens are a bit hard to read against the background. This is also true about the lighter blue on blue colors in the theme.

You can pick up the Zodiac themes from Bplay for $4.99 each from the following link.

With all said if you are a horoscope fan I am sure these themes will speak to you. For the rest of you I highly recommend checking out Bplay’s innovative Crossbar theme they released last week.

The mastermind behind VistoThemes.com, Corey, has released a free theme that I really think looks quite nice. The theme has a definite rugged look which I like. The rounded boxes around the icons look nice but make it harder to differentiate between icons on the fly. The menu text is also white which causes some problems with Google Talk where the application forces the menu background to be light blue. I still don’t understand why RIM overrode the user theme in Google Talk.

The menus otherwise look very nice and have a distinct similarity with the other great themes Corey has released in the past.

You can pick up the theme OTA at the following link. The theme is available in Zen, Today, and Icon versions for each device. Thanks Corey!

The scanR BlackBerry application that we mentioned yesterday has been released to the public today. You can find the announcement on their website with some great screenshots. As we mentioned before the application lets you take pictures of whiteboards and notes and have them converted into text and more readable images.

You can pick up the application by going to m.scanr.com from your BlackBerry browser. You can read more about the service on their website www.scanr.com. The pricing model needs a little explaining but you get 5 scans a month for free. They have a $2.99 a month plan or some sort of prepaid plan I cannot understand. They also have a $29.99 annual plan.

Let us know what you think and if you want to do a review.

Corey at VistoThemes.com has released another hot new theme for practically all the BlackBerry versions out there. The theme is called H20 and is very similar to the BB Droid theme we mentioned a few weeks back. The theme is very nice and fixes one of the problems I had with the Droid theme. It no longer uses a white font in the menus. That white font would make menus in Google Talk unreadable.

The background is nice a bluey which looks pretty slick and the menu and prompts look very Macky. The theme comes in all Zen, Icon, & Today formats. I did find the icons very big which only allows for 3 rows of icons compared to the 4 in the Android theme. The flip side is that the larger icons are very easy to understand. Its one of those different strokes kind of things.

All in all a very nice theme for $6. You can pick it up from the VistoThemes.com website at this link.

While I am not sure how well this will actually work scanR has a potential hit if it does. The idea is that you can take a picture of a whiteboard or notes from your BlackBerry and upload it directly to the scanR website. Once it is there you can extract the text and contact information if there is such which is very useful. You can also create PDF files and send them to others. In the future they plan on adding the ability to scan business cards and documents with the camera but they need higher resolutions.

I have to say that if the results are anywhere near what they are showing on their website then this will be awesome!!! The software even lets you combine pictures together. Look at what I mean below. I will let the pictures speak for themselves:

You can read more about the service by going to this link: www.scanr.com. The service is set to go completely live tomorrow. After that you will be able to download the BlackBerry application from their mobile website which we will mention tomorrow. You can see more of the conversion screenshots after the jump. So far the basic version is free which allows for 5 uploads a month. Their plans after that are pretty reasonably priced from $2.99 – $29.90.

Read the rest of this article

I have gotten quite a few questions about this over the past few weeks so I thought I would mention it. Most old time BlackBerry users will remember the 5 free BlackBerry tools that came out back in the day. They are sill oldies but goodies.

Namely:

• BBWeather – Pretty good weather application
• BBLight – Simple flashlight
• BBToday – Very simplistic today screen (does not really work anymore)
• BBcorrector – Spellchecker that requires data usage and is slow
• BBreply – Change the reply to email address

These have not been updated in ages but some of them still work. For example I still use the BBweather application but you have to fiddle around with it a bit to get it to work on newer trackball BlackBerry devices.

As Mark Rejhon points out on BlackBerryForums these applications are still available. You can pick them up OTA at this link or you can head on over to BlackBerryForums to download the ALX files.

If you are looking for a weather application I would recommend BBweather. The trick to get it to work is that after you install the application ignore the error. Click the trackball to clear the error and hit it again to bring up the menu. Select options and put in your location ID (which is you zip code in the US) and uncheck the box Disable MDS if you are on a BES.