TechieGroups

SECURITY RESEARCHERS have discovered a flaw in Research in Motion’s (RIM) Blackberry Playbook Bridge software that allows data to be intercepted.

Ben Nell and Zach Lanier, consultants at mobile security firm Intrepidus Group, have found that an attacker can gain access to the Bridge connection and steal email along with other data. They announced their findings at the Infiltrate conference yesterday, according to Threatpost.com.

An authentication token sent between a Blackberry smartphone and a Blackberry Playbook is put in a readable place that a hacker can access by using a malicious app. Grabbing this token gives the attacker remote access to the Playbook’s files.

“While the bridge is active, the token is in a place that is essentially world readable. The .all file being in a place that is world readable is the thing that causes the problem with the Bridge sessions,” said Lanier.

Blackberry Bridge involves a Playbook tablet communicating wirelessly with a Blackberry smartphone via a Bluetooth connection. It is touted as a big selling point for the tablet.

At this year’s consumer electronics show (CES) in Las Vegas RIM announced new versions of its operating systems, Blackberry 7.1 and Blackberry Playbook 2.0. RIM has told The INQUIRER that these versions will fix the problem.

RIM said, “The Blackberry Playbook issue described at the Infiltrate security conference has been resolved with Blackberry Playbook OS 2.0, which is scheduled to be available as a free download to customers in February 2012.”

“There are no known exploits and risk is mitigated by the fact that a user would need to install and run a malicious application after initiating a Blackberry Bridge connection with their Blackberry smartphone.”

For a closer look at the upcoming RIM operating systems check out our video demo from CES. µ

CANADIAN MOBILE FIRM Research in Motion (RIM) has proudly though belatedly announced that it can now offer its users Angry Birds on their Playbook tablets.

The Playbook has been somewhat slow to impress people and has not set the tablet market alight in ways that perhaps the firm had expected.

Still, it is no doubt a lot more fun to use now that you can play a game on it that has been available on other devices for more than a year.

Three versions of the game are available on the Playbook, the original Angry Birds, Angry Birds Seasons, and Angry Birds Rio, which was released to coincide with a film of the same name.

You know the drill, you fire birds at pigs in order to kill them and save unhatched eggs. Given that the birds you send die in the explosions it is possibly a rather self defeating exercise.

Anyway, it is in the Blackberry App store now. We could only find the US price, despite looking in the UK store, and this is .99 for each game. µ

CANADIAN GADGET MAKER Research in Motion (RIM) has lost cash after selling Playbooks at a discount failed to rid it of excess inventory.

The company announced today that it will record a pre-tax provision in the third quarter of fiscal 2012 of approximately 5 million, 0 million after tax, related to its inventory valuation of Blackberry Playbook tablets.

The firm said that it has “a high level of Blackberry Playbook inventory” and “now believes that an increase in promotional activity is required to drive sell-through to end customers”.

RIM said several factors, including “recent shifts in the competitive dynamics of the tablet market” and a “delay in the release of the PlayBook OS 2.0 software”,  caused the inventory buildup.

The company said it will “record a provision that reflects the current market environment and allows it to expand upon the aggressive level of promotional activity recently employed by the company in order to drive Playbook adoption around the world”.

It added, “Based on the positive response to the promotions that are underway in select markets, RIM believes this strategy will accelerate adoption of its QNX-based platform by consumers and enterprises, as well as help to drive the development of a vibrant application ecosystem in advance of its next generation BlackBerry smartphones.”

RIM only sold 150,000 Blackberry Playbook tablets in the third quarter, but said that sell-through to end customers, based on RIM’s internal data, was higher than this number.

The company said that consumer and enterprise customers that buy a new Blackberry Playbook at the current promotional pricing, along with existing Playbook customers, will be able to upgrade to the enhanced Playbook OS 2.0 software at no additional charge when it becomes available in February 2012.

The company said that it will take a charge of m related to the service outage that occurred in the quarter, so its third quarter revenue is “expected to be slightly lower than the previously guided range of .3-5.6 billion”.

“RIM is committed to the BlackBerry Playbook and believes the tablet market is still in its infancy. Although a number of factors have led to the need for an inventory provision in the third quarter, we believe the Playbook, which will be further enhanced with the upcoming Playbook OS 2.0 software, is a compelling tablet for consumers that also offers unique security and manageability features for the enterprise,” said Mike Lazaridis, Co-CEO of Research In Motion.

“Early results from recent Playbook promotions indicate a significant increase in demand across most channels. We look forward to continuing to grow the installed base of Playbook users and to attracting more and more developers to expand the volume of applications, content and services that leverage the power of the industry leading QNX-based platform.”

The company said it shipped approximately 14.1 million Blackberry smartphones in the third quarter ended November 26, 2011, which was in line with previous guidance. It’s finalized third quarter results will be announced on 15 December.

Whether we’ll see fire sales reminiscent of HP isn’t certain, but it looks like RIM might have realised that £500 for a tablet that isn’t the Ipad just isn’t going to sell.

The Blackberry maker did a “buy two get one free” offer recently, and Playbooks have been available for £250 from certain channels, on and off.

One thing is for sure, selling tablets for £100 certainly gets your sales up, but it’s just not so good for profits. µ

BLACKBERRY MAKER Research In Motion (RIM) has launched its PlayBook tablet, however, initial reports suggest that the device isn’t exactly flying off shop shelves.

A number of stores carried the device for the 19 April release in the US and Canada, but many of them only had a handful of units, according to a limited and not very scientific study by Reuters.

Reuters checked out four stores in Toronto and found that none of them had more than five Playbooks in stock. More worryingly for RIM, perhaps, by mid-afternoon all of these stores still had some of their Playbooks available. Something that either suggests that Playbook buyers were otherwise engaged, or that the much-hyped Ipad rival isn’t selling well.

“It’s going to be a tough sell to the consumer,” Colin Gillis, an analyst with BGC Partners, told Reuters. He cited the lack of secure email, one of the selling points of the Blackberry smartphone, as a deciding factor in why people are refusing to buy.

The apparent poor sales could contrast starkly with the launch of the Ipad 2 last month, where many stores ended up sold out within hours and customers were frequently greeted with long queues.

It’s likely that RIM will recover some ground in the enterprise market, where it still has major market share in smartphones. The Blackberry brand is trusted by many in the business world, which could help the company persuade business people to get a Playbook instead of an Ipad, but the missing features are likely to negatively impact that, not to mention the poor consumer turnout.

A number of analysts have indicated that sales of the Playbook will pick up the pace over time, making it a ‘slow burn’ product, but that reality is unlikely to sit well with RIM executives, who are anxiously watching as their tablet debuts to an apparently non-existant audience.

RIM is expected to sell roughly three million Playbooks by the end of the year, significantly fewer than the close to 15 million Ipads Apple sold in 2010. If sales don’t pick up sometime soon, however, it might not even reach this target.

Blackberry spokespeople in the UK would not comment on sales, or sales predictions. µ

This summer has been a busy one for smartphone platforms. We started the summer with an Apple iOS update that remedied a number of the primary concerns with Apple’s iDevice platforms, followed by the launch of the iPhone 4. Meanwhile, the Android flagship crown was passed between no less than 4 devices (HTC Incredible, HTC EVO 4G, Droid X, and now arguably Droid 2 or Galaxy S phones), and Google’s OEM partners have slowly but surely rolled Froyo 2.2 out across their install base. 

Now it’s Research In Motion’s turn to deliver a summer update. Their answer is two pronged – BlackBerry 6 (that’s not a typo, they’ve named the new OS after the platform itself – BlackBerry 6), and a new device for AT&T, the BlackBerry Torch.

Lately, the BlackBerry platform as a whole has been showing its age. Browsing the web and checking email on a mobile device are no longer novelties that wow on their own – they’re old hat. Further, smartphone browsers have established a pretty steady cadence toward parity with the desktop in both speed and rendering, something the BlackBerry’s previous web browser was frequently criticized for failing to deliver – at all.

On carriers like Verizon, where BlackBerry once reigned supreme at the top of the smartphone food chain, it now faces direct competition with Android. The first Storm was a commercial failure, and the Storm 2 – though better – was still not the proverbial home run RIM needed.

One year and one acquisition later, and RIM is ready to play ball with a modern, WebKit based browser, revamped hardware design, and true capacitive multitouch screen (sans SurePress). How does the BlackBerry Torch fare? Read on for the full review.