Remember the new Porsche concept car QNX was showing off at CES? You might have heard that they added some cloud integration, and were showing it off at Mobile World Congress 2012. Of course, we had to check this out for ourselves.
NewBay is an online content locker where you can store your music, pictures, video, and other files in the cloud for access just about anywhere. RIM acquired them in October, so we're still waiting to see the service bundled in with BlackBerry devices like iCloud. In the meantime, NewBay has partnered up with fellow acquiree, QNX, so that the car could access that content through the primary dash and the rear-mounted BlackBerry PlayBooks. Of course, this is just a tech demo, but it gives a very clear idea of the kinds of products RIM has coming down the pipe.
Unfortunately, Wi-Fi at the show was pretty rough, nevermind attempting to use the QNX Porsche's integrated cellular connection, so they had to hook up the car with an ethernet cable to get everything running. The guys at NewBay and QNX apparently only took a week or two to pull off this partnership, so it's understandable that video sharing wasn't fully implemented yet.
Considering how many companies RIM has been snatching up over the last couple of years, I'm interested to see other partnerships between RIM subsidiaries pan out into real products, and not just neat concepts.
Reader comments
NewBay streams cloud-stored music to QNX Porsche
this is finally something innovative from RIM, but until I read about a rock-solid deal with OEM/car makers to have playbooks in their vehicles, this is just vaporware.
Its about execution. again. Like dual core phones.
There are 25 million cars with QNX telematics systems --- stuff like OnStar is based on QNX. It's going to be white label and you will never know it's QNX based.
"In the wild it won't need an Ethernet cable right?" LOL... just trying to visualize cars driving around with miles of CAT5 behind them.
that is indeed a funny image
omg Simon Sage how tall are you mate ??? birds eye view was more like google earth
Lol
Haha, okay, that deserves a bit of explanation. I'm 6'8", but the aerial shots are way higher. I've got the camera on a monopod with a ball head, and the camera has an articulating display, which I tilted down while I held the camera up on the monopod. Sure, I looked pretty stupid walking around the BlackBerry booth holding a stick with a camera on the end, but the added elevation gives a pretty nice view, if I say so myself. Took a few stills with the same technique, let me dig 'em up...
When can we expect to have this service available for our playbooks??
For now, it's just a tech demo, so no time soon. A bit of a bummer.
"...I'm interested to see other partnerships between RIM subsidiaries pan out into real products, and not just neat concepts. "
That's the key isn't it? Something that RIM does not seem to be really grasping yet. Still letting companies that they bought function as autonomous entities doing their own thing "under the RIM umbrella" which translates to, BlackBerry is still little more then a side project for these people.
Newbay should be re-named BlackBerry Protect and Media services group or something and work on making BlackBerry Protect the best on the market and getting stellar cloud media services working on the platform.
Why even buy the companies if they are just going to do work you could have contracted them for anyway?
Yes, we get it, RIM has all the pieces it needs to create the best mobile computing platform in the world. But still, years pass and the products just trickle out little by little never really coming together, looking like a hodgepodge of disjointed ideas. We all can see the vision, we get what RIM wants to accomplish, we see the talent that they employ and technology that they have. What we want to see is all that come together into a platform that really does "leapfrog the competition" But it had better come to life in BlackBerry 10 THIS YEAR or the competition will continue to eat RIM's lunch.
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