Tuesday, July 19, 2011

RIM Releases BlackBerry Tablet OS v1.0.7

Owners of a BlackBerry PlayBook tablet PC from Canadian handset vendor Research In Motion now have a new flavor of the BlackBerry Tablet OS available for download for their devices, namely version 1.0.7.

The new operating system iteration was made available for users today, with a variety of enhancements and improvements included into the mix.

Among them, we can count support for a number of 15 new languages, including: Basque, Catalan, Czech, Danish, Galician, Hungarian, Bahasa Indonesia, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese Brazilian, Portuguese European, Romanian, Russian, Swedish, and Turkish.

The release notes for the new OS flavor show:

- Enhanced Support for Saving Attachments – The BlackBerry Bridge app offers you more flexibility around where and how you save attachments for viewing and editing. You can now save an attachment to a removable SD card, or to your BlackBerry smartphone’s internal flash memory.

- ZIP Attachment Support – The BlackBerry Bridge app now gives you access to ZIP files received as an email attachment. While bridged, you can now download a zip file from an email to your smartphone SD card and then extract compressed contents for viewing or editing on your BlackBerry PlayBook tablet.

- Portrait Support in Pictures App – With BlackBerry Tablet OS v1.0.7, pictures that you’ve taken with your BlackBerry PlayBook tablet or transferred from your PC can now be viewed in either portrait or landscape formats for the layout that best fits your needs.

- Pinch to Zoom in Video App – Use the pinch gesture to zoom in on the finer details of your favorite video content, just like you would with a website or picture today – all while the video continues to play.

Those who would like to download and install the new OS version on their tablet PCs should know that the process can be done over the air.

Users who purchase a new device will be automatically upgraded to the BlackBerry Tablet OS v1.0.7 as part of their device setup process.

As soon as the new OS flavor is available for download, existing BlackBerry PlayBook tablet users will be informed on its availability and will be prompted to download and install it. The notification will appear on the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet status ribbon.

At the same time, the mobile phone maker announced that users can also perform manual checks to see whether the new software is available for their devices or not. This can be done from the Settings Menu under Software Updates.