Howdy CrackBerry Idol fans and participants! As you may have noticed, we took a break for the July 4th weekend from running Round 1 BlackBerry app reviews here on the blogs, so wanted to get back into the swing of things with a little update post. Keep reading for the details...

Round 1 Update: So far we've ran 10 out of the 24 BlackBerry app reviews here on the blogs. If you've missed any, you can always visit the crackberry.com/idol for the list or the CrackBerry Idol post tag to watch them all. Starting today, we'll be running 2 more entries per day (usually late afternoon/evening) right through Saturday, and we'll run the last four on Monday and Tuesday next week. The Round 1 recap and community voting will begin on Wednesday, July 14th.

How will voting work: 10 contestants will move onto Round 2 from Round 1. The voting will be conducted by the community. We'll be running a poll here on the blogs (also embedded on the contest page) that will feature all 24 contestants names. You will be able to cast your vote for up ten of the 24 names. So if you have ten favorites you want to move on, you can vote for all ten. Or if you only have a few you'd like to see progress you can choose to only vote for the few (or even one, just so you don't further split votes). The ten contestants with the most votes will move onto Round 2.

Round 2 changes: Originally Round 2 was going to be the "BlackBerry case review" round, from which 5 contestants would move onto Round 3, the "bigger accessory review" round, and then two or three contestants would move onto the final round, the device review. We've been so happy with the quality of the contestants that we're going to change things up a bit and also keep them more exciting for the readers. We're essentially going to skip the case review round and go straight to the the more exciting BlackBerry accessory round.

So Round 2 will now be comprised of what we would call "featured BlackBerry accessory reviews." Think Bluetooth headset shootouts, case comparsions, detailed how to / reviews (schlage, viper car start, etc.). These will be in-depth , creative, wide-ranging and FUN reviews... both for the contestants to produce and for our audience to read. From there, five contestants will move on to the final round to review a BlackBerry Smartphone (each contestant getting a brand new BlackBerry that they'll get to keep!).

Stay Tuned for more CrackBerry Idol Action:  That's it! Keep it locked to CrackBerry.com for more CrackBerry Idol action.