Oh, how the mighty have fallen. Research in Motion used to be the most corporate-centered smartphone company in the world, catering primarily to people in three-piece suits who had to look like they were busy all the time. Times have changed and now you want to be hip, cool, and connected. So, RIM is apparently revamping its company image.

Say hello to the four new mascots for Research in Motion, a group of four cartoon superheroes who are daring you to be “be bold” for 2012. This looks like it’s more in line with the Saturday morning cartoon crowd than it is with the financial blokes on Wall Street. The four cartoon characters are meant to embody four types of BlackBerry users.

GoGo Girl is the achiever, “saving the day with a brilliant strategy, a smile or a spatula.” Justin Steele is the advocate, “always ready to stick up for his friends.” Trudy Foreal is the authentic, “not afraid to call it as she sees it.” And Max Stone is the adventurer, “able to jump out of a plane.” RIM held an informal survey to see how their users broke down and 31% self-identified as achievers, followed by 27% adventurers, 24% advocates, and 18% authentics.

I guess it’s good that RIM is going in a bold new direction, since the old direction was heading straight to the poor house, but I’m not sure this almost kid-centric approach is really what they should be doing.

This isn’t exactly official, per se, as CrackBerry simply found the leaked slide, but this is pretty darn close. The BlackBerry London was hinted at and leaked before, but that was when we were still calling it the first BBX phone. Now, it’s BlackBerry 10 and the hardware design is distinctly different. There’s almost something about it that reminds me of the Galaxy S II and others of that slim smartphone ilk.

Some people are saying that the BlackBerry London is more like a shrunken down, phone-sized version of the BlackBerry PlayBook. That almost makes sense, especially with that great rubberized-feeling back. As far as specs, we’re hearing of either a TI OMAP5 or Qualcomm chipset, both of which are of the 1.5GHz dual core variety. They’ve seemingly done away with hardware buttons too, not unlike the PlayBook.

The London will also be joined by the BlackBerry Lisbon and the BlackBerry Laguna, all of which will be doing the BlackBerry 10 thing and all of which should be due for release later this year.

Porsche met Blackberry back in October with their P 9981 concept, an interesting looking device that is essentially just a standard Blackberry that has been beautified with Porsche styling. For many, you will find that there is little reason to own this model, either because of price, or just because you can get a better phone for even less.

While I will never own one, we did manage to get a look thanks to the folks at TechnoBuffalo, who were sent a working unit for review.  Judging by the video, it seems to have pretty good build quality, but probably not enough to warrant the $2400 USD price tag.

For those that aren’t familiar with it, the P 9981 is essentially just a Blackberry Bold 9900, and features a 1.2GHz processor, 8GB storage, NFC support, microSD, 2.8” display, and 5MP camera. For those that like style and have the money to burn, it certainly is an attractive looking unit.

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Research in Motion had a tough 2011, their troubles are far from being over, and it has become such daunting task to lead the company in its current state, that co-CEOs, Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie have finally jumped off the sinking ship.  The company has announced the two are stepping down, while Thorsten Heins, currently RIM’s COO of Product Engineering, will take over as the new CEO; Heins believes he can stop the ship from sinking.

Both Lazaridis and Balsillie, who have been heading up the company for two decades, will still be on board though. Lazaridis will stay as vice chair of the board while Balsillie will be an ordinary director.  And they seem to be fully confident that Heins will be able to make things right. But it’s definitely not going to be easy for him.

Just to refresh your memory, the BlackBerry PlayBook turned out to be a painful experience for the company after it was released a couple of months back. They had to go through all sorts of trouble, including software glitches, price drops, massive competition, lack of apps and the list goes on. The big outage that came in October and the lawsuit over the use of BBX added to the agony. And the company’s market share is going down as iOS and Android are becoming more and more popular.

But still, Heins has high hopes. He believes that “everything is in place for the company to grow”. One of the first steps that he will be taking as the company’s head will be hiring a Chief Marketing Officer to make sure that the BlackBerry brand remains popular.

Check out the video to learn more about Heins’ ideas.

It appears like the PlayBook sales during the holiday season didn’t quite go as planned for RIM. In what seems to be a very desperate move, the company has started offering all models of the tablet with a price tag of $299 on their online store.

Earlier, the company set the beginning price point at $199 for the 16GB model. Now, both the 32GB and the 64GB PlayBooks are available for the same price as the 16GB tablet.

Although the tablet is not that cool when we consider the availability of applications and security features and all, the new deal appears to be a good one if you are already stuck with a BlackBerry.

But you better make it quick if you want to play with the 64GB version as that deal is the most attractive and it’s not known whether there are enough of them available and I couldn’t imagine them selling many 16GB models with this offer.

The price cut from RIM is certainly not a surprise. The company’s recent earnings report suggests that the PlayBook’s popularity is decreasing and the only way to make people interested in the flawed tablet is with a discount.

RIM will be offering the tablet for the new price until February 4. As you might know, the PlayBook OS 2.0 is scheduled to hit devices sometime in the coming month. The new PlayBook fire sale could be a planned attack to move as many units as possible into people’s hands ahead of the update.

It appears like iOS users are the ones who are crazy about mobile web browsing. According to the latest data, Apple’s operating system has finished 2011 on top with a 52.1 percent market share of mobile web, although that’s a fall from a 54.06 percent lead back in January 2011.

The new info comes to us courtesy of NetMarketShare which keeps track of the visitors to their network of websites. And surprisingly, their data suggests that Android users are not too much into mobile web.

Google’s OS is in the third spot with a 16.2% share behind Java ME with 21.27% market share. The ones which failed to get into the top three include Symbian (5.76%), BlackBerry (3.51%) and “Other” (1.07%) which should include Windows Phone.

The dominance of the Apple OS in mobile web browsing has been steady throughout 2011, with only slight fluctuations.

The highest numbers for iOS are in October when its market share climbed to 61.5 percent, most probably as a result of the iPhone 4S launch. The lowest was in February when its share dropped to 46.57 percent, likely due to customers selling their iPads to get their hands on the iPad 2 which was released in March.

Going a bit deeper into the info, Apple’s iPhone has a 25.24% share, while the iPad accounts for 24.53% and the iPod Touch is at 2.32%.

It’s certainly surprising that the Android platform’s share is far behind, especially when we consider the fact that Android has dominated the market when it comes to the number of devices sold and activated.

Jonathan S. Geller of BGR quoting unnamed sources at Research In Motion, paints a very troubling picture about the development of RIM’s new BlackBerry 10 OS, new phones and the overall state of the company. Insider sources claim to have contacts at high level management of the company supposedly tell that a reason of BlackBerry 10 OS delay is not the lack of LTE chipset, or development for it, it’s the sad state of BlackBerry 10 itself; that has not email application, nor BBM, the messenger that was responsible more than anything for RIM’s success in its BlackBerry line of phones.

Following the succesful penetration of Dingleberry Team into bastions of Blackberry Playbooks, the Spanish blog eltecnoblog.com has posted a demo of the exploit for turning on the HOST mode in Blackberry Playbook’s USB port; commonly known as USB On-The-Go (OTG) connection to a host computer for sideloading and other simple tasks.

The instructions for anyone willing to repeat the feat on their Playbooks are promised for the later date. But in any case, the exploit is very important. Blackberry Playbok has no external SD slot, so basically if you have purchased a 16 GB unit at some store where “fire” sales of these are going for $199, then that’s it, 16GB of storage is all you’ve got.

Sure, you can do some sideloading and replacing your old HD flicks with new ones using an original, stock OTG connection to your computer, but it’s a hassle. Using a USB flash stick is much more convenient. When powered from its AC adapter, the Blackberry Playbook might even connect to 2.5″ hard drives in mobile powered enclosures.

A Blackberry Playbook can work with Bluetooth keyboards and mice out of the box, and professional customers like the feature. This time, “regular” USB keyboards and mice can work. Remote printing over WiFi is fine and elegant, but there are tons of “regular” USB printers that can be reached by Playbook now.

Putting peripheral connectivity aside, this development is very significant for all those tinkerers who dream to put Ice Cream Sandwich on this cheap, but very powerful and versatile device. Sure, initial probes and rooting has been accomplished without the USB HOST feature activated and they might continue without it. The ease of use of just a flash stick makes this tinkering much more attractive.

It’s unclear at the moment whether or not the unveiling of a USB HOST mode will survive a security update roll-out, or OS upgrade to 2.0, but the accomplishment is great.

According to a post at Crackberry, the Blackberry Playbook has now been cracked…. errr, rooted, I wanted to say.

A team named Dingleberry (immature name, I know) made up of three mysterious guys nicknamed as xpvqs, neuralic, and cmwdotme have succeeded in gaining access and reverting some Blackberry OS system permissions. This allows the OS to be tweaked into doing some things it couldn’t before.

The first video shows the BB Playbook blinking with LEDs and dimming the backlight accomplished on remote from the host computer’s terminal. A bit better visual proof of the successful root is shown in video below:

This second, quite brief video shows the usually not very playful BB Playbook successfully running the Hulu (Android) app.

This is all the evidence of the root for now, but you can try to follow the Dingleberry developments through all their tweets:

http://twitter.com/xpvqs

http://twitter.com/neuralic

http://twitter.com/cmwdotme

As of today, they also promise the release of their Dingleberry Tool soon, and an IRC channel to converse with a more technically inclined audience.

So far, the Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales of heavily discounted BB Playbooks were met with mixed success. There are also  some people at the Crackberry forum who are claiming that they are RIM’s employees and predict fire sales of BB Playbook 16 GB at the HP Touchpad price point: $99.

Refurbished units could be had at $150 – $170 these last couple of days. All these rumors and slashed price tags may lead to the situation that BB Playbook could become a good playground for various tinkerers. The majority of them these days are definitely Android hackers.

The BB Playbook’s reference design is quite similar, or is a direct ascendant of the platform used in the NOOK Tablet. The NOOK Tablet is just a blind (=no cameras) and disoriented (=no GPS) stepson of mighty BB Playbook with perfect HD vision.

Evidently, both these relatives’ hardware employ the same military-strong protection and security system named M-Shiled by Texas Instruments.

Until now, there were no reports of compromising, or circumventing M-Shield’s stronghold imposed on bootloader or other critical parts of respective systems. Keep in mind however,  such a protection is a multi-layered business by definition, and some of its tiers might be not really protected against simple exploits. Nothing of these exploits ever touches the integrity of QNX microkernel itself though.

One of such rooting exploits was used to root the NOOK Tablet, a similar exploit helped in rooting Amazon Kindle Fire — another BB Playbook’s stepson, this time not only blind, but also deaf (no microphone) and with a loss of external memory compared to NOOK Tablet. Today, it is unclear whether these new “e-reader” tablets will be capable of running other than stock kernels, but as of now customizations based on them are moving on fast.

My take on it goes like this: If the Dingleberry Team or any of their followers will be successful, BB Playbook will run Android Market, Google Apps (like Google Mail, Google Voice, Google Talk, and whatever Google) via the BB OS Android App Player. In a sense, a similar sandbox approach, only quite narrower and straight-jacketed for users longing for a “native” email app, was already demoed by RIM engineers themselves who are developing their version of Android “compatibility” for the forthcoming BB OS 2.0 release.

This is to say, that as long as a Dalvik Virtual Machine (aka Android) could be sandboxed and running safely on the QNX-based BB Playbook, there’s nothing threatening the integrity of QNX core itself could be assumed from such a development, or from Dingleberry Team’s exploit for that matter.

Personnel of nuclear installations, at International Space Station, of major Internet routers and other QNX critical installations of “mission impossible” rank may again breathe freely: these types of ‘hacks’ won’t harm you.

If Android apps really can run well in a sand-boxed mode, then this BB Playbook for $99 (or even for $199) may become a very attractive Christmas gift if compared to those blind and deaf Kindle Fires and NOOK Tablets.

Indonesia was the country selected to launch the new Blackberry 9790 Bold to the entire world. The Reason? Indonesia’s TOP-5 Mobile Phones are all BlackBerry Models.

During this launch, BlackBerry offered a 50% discount on its new phone over its suggested price.

When it became obvious that there weren’t enough phones to satisfy all of those waiting, a mass of shoppers fell out of the line creating a bit of frantic situation. This break in the line would lead to over 90 people being injured with three needing to be hospitalized for broken bones, and more than 200 police officers were needed to restore peace.

As you can see, when a massive event is poorly organized only bad things will happen. At least in the States RIM wouldn’t have to worry about such a massive crowd causing problems thanks to declining Blackberry popularity. Apple on the other hand? They might want to keep this event in mind when the iPhone 5 launches.

Here is a short video showing just how large the crowd was for the event: