You know the old adage “Any Press Is Good Press”? Well I guess we have another case in point. After all the headache the Indian government has been causing RIM it is surprising to find that India only has 114,000 BlackBerry users. This is down from the half a million users that the media had us assuming existed until now. I guess RIM is really hoping to capitalize on the billions of people living there in their future plans.

The funniest part is that this whole controversy has caused RIM to add over 50,000 new accounts in the last 4 months. That means there were only 64,000 accounts before this whole drama started.

I guess it is in RIM’s own interests to continue with these ridiculous discussions with India’s government. So far they have netted themselves an extra 1–2 million a month from these new 50,000 subscribers.

I know this is not a new service but I finally had a chance to try it out while out in California on vacation. (I don’t drive all that much since I live in Manhattan) I have to say it works damn well. A little GPS BlackBerry app installs on your Berry and will alert you when you approach the speedtrap. Pretty cool for a free service.

If you tend to speed and don’t have the cash to dump on a radar detector (or are scared of being caught with one ) this is a great service. Even if you don’t have GPS on your Berry or don’t want to install the app you can still check out the reported speed traps in your area.

Check it out by signing up free at www.Trapster.com

BoyGenius has really gone back to its roots recently. They have been leaking proprietary RIM information left and right last week. First he announced the upcoming BlackBerry KickStart Flip Phone and then the specifications. Now he just hit us up with information on the Niagara 9000 series phone without the 3G features.

Check out the following 3 posts on The BoyGenius for more info

• KickStart Unveiling
• More info on KickStart
• BlackBerry Niagara info

After mentioning ChordGenie on Friday I found this other application for Guitar Hero wanabies.  It is called Guitar Trainer and can be picked up for $4.99 which is cheaper than ChordGenie. This one is more focused towards people who have the basic chords but want to expand their musical vocabulary. The cool part is that it is available in multiple languages ranging from French to Brazilian Portuguese. It worked like a charm on my 8310 but I could not get it to take a screenshot. Every screenshot came out white.

From the description on their website:

How does it work?

It’s very simple: you are presented with a random note on the fretboard, and are offered a variety of 9 choices for the correct answer. Just hit the key corresponding to the correct choice to score a hit!

As your score gets better and you manage to identify notes faster across the entire fretboard, your working knowledge of your instrument increases!

 

Why would I want this?

You would be amazed to know how many experienced guitarists have such a reduced knowledge of their instrument. Most people tend to confine their learning to tablature, and the shapes of certain chords and scales. More often than not, they have no idea what notes they are actually hitting!

Features

• Learn the location of notes on the fretboard of a guitar or other stringed instrument.
• Supports a variety of standard and alternate string tunings: guitar, bass, banjo, ukulele, mandolin.
• Training mode allows to focus learning on particular parts of the fretboard, and even focus on individual strings.
• Game mode provides a fun way to make progress. Work your way through levels of increasing difficulty!
• Train your ear at the same time as you improve your working knowledge of the instrument.
• Display notes as letters (A, B, C…) or solfege syllables (Do, Re, Mi…).
• Left-handed and right-handed neck types.
• Tune your instrument with your cell phone. Open string tones can be produced for any of the supported tunings!
• Dynamic user interface that works on a wide variety of mobile devices.
• Support for pointer input (stylus, touch screen, etc).
• Available in English, French, Spanish, Italian, Romanian, Brazilian Portuguese, German and Hebrew languages.

Over the weekend one of my friends was a complete broken record. Every few minutes the conversation turned back to how Iron Man is going to be an awesome movie and how I HAVE to see it on Saturday night. It turns out I did not see it (Went out for a drink instead ) but I guess people have really bought into the hype surrounding the movie.  Bplay plans on capitalizing on that with their latest release – Iron Man The Game.

Iron Man – $7.99

You are the invincible Iron Man! Equipped with repulsor rays and the devastating unibeam, you play as the Armored Avenger in this vertically scrolling shoot-’em-up based on the upcoming movie starring Robert Downey Jr. ‘Nuff said.

Visit locations based on locations from the summer blockbuster as you blast away at enemy forces equipped with the weapons that you, Tony Stark, developed. Collect power-ups and destroy relentless waves of enemy units en route to a climactic confrontation with the world’s greatest new foe: Iron Monger!

Sorry for the late notice on this one but one of our readers just let us know that PocketDay has released a new version. It is recommended to upgrade real soon since they have changed weather services and your old weather will not work anymore come sometime this week.

They have also added some new features to the weather plugin including radar images. Mostly they have just updated the tasks and calendar UI to fit better with OS 4.3 and 4.5 devices.

You can pick up the latest version by pointing your BlackBerry to www.PocketDay.com/ota.htm

Here is another chance for you to play Brick Breaker. Even if it’s in your dreams only. RIM has announced some more down time for maintenance tonight or tomorrow, depending on how you view it. The official date is Saturday, May 3rd, from 2:00 am to 6:00 am, and it is supposed to affect “the Americas”. If you live in any of the Americas and intend to be awake during that period, don’t count too much on your Blackberry data service. Don’t panic either. Everything should be OK in the morning. We surely hope so.

I must be a moron since I have never heard of Bank of America’s mobile site until now even though it has been around since last year. Well I decided to rectify my mistake by mentioning it to all of you who may happen to be Bank of America customers.

The website is really cool and even has a BlackBerry shortcut application that you can install on your homescreen. Why did nobody tell me about this!

If you head over to www.BofA.mobi from your BlackBerry browser you will be taken to a page that says:

Please download the ‘Mobile Banking Shortcut for BlackBerry’ by visiting http://mobilebanking.bankofamerica.com/bb. This shortcut will access the correct browser and allow you to securely access mobile banking.

I also found out that if you don’t want to download the shortcut you can just access the website by going to: https://www.bankofamerica.com/mobile/ Please do me a favor and make sure the HTTPS is in the beginning of the URL before you type in your password.

Sadly none of my other banks offer such a service (at least that I know of). Please correct me if I am wrong. Chase allows you to text message them to get your account info but that is a bore. I know Wachovia has some sort of mobile banking option but I don’t use them.