BlackBerry has updated five of its listed apps in the Google Play Store
Many Android users might not know that you don't have to own a BlackBerry phone to install some BlackBerry apps in the Google Play Store. Take the BlackBerry Calendar, if you are toting a 'Berry, the app is free to use for 30-days. After the trial is over, you have to subscribe to BlackBerry Hub+ for the price of 99 cents a month. If you like the BlackBerry Password Keeper, that is an app that you can also install on a non-BlackBerry phone. On the other hand, DTEK can only be used on a 'Berry.
Subscribing to BlackBerry Hub+ allows most Android phones to install:
- BlackBerry Hub
- BlackBerry Calendar
- BlackBerry Password Keeper
- Contacts by BlackBerry
- BlackBerry Device Search
- Notes by BlackBerry
- Tasks by BlackBerry
- BlackBerry Launcher
- BlackBerry Privacy Shade
On Friday, BlackBerry announced a slew of updates to five of its listed apps including the DTEK security app, the Privacy Shade which prevents bystanders from gleaning any important information by staring at your phone, and more. The apps that were updated include:
Calendar
Contacts
DTEK
Privacy Shade
Power Center
- New Month View
- The long-awaited improvement to the calendar Month View is here! If you prefer the month view you can now see the list of events in a grid view. Picking different dates in the calendar also gets a refresh in the quick picker view, which gets standardized across all the different calendar views as well. This quick picker view, now has the legacy busyness indicator (circle represents 24 hr clock) to help with planning of your busy schedule.
Contacts
- New Month View
- Creating a new contact is now even easier. If you search for name, email address or a phone number and these are not found in your contact list, creating a new contact will prepopulate these in the appropriate field of the new contact card.
DTEK
- Complete Home Screen Redesign
- A fresh new look to DTEK to help prioritize the most important information. The new DTEK meter shows you at a quick glace the overall security health of your phone. The screen has also been updated to allow easier entry points for the other functions within DTEK.
- Notification Improvements
- Now you can log permissions accesses on an event by event basis without cluttering up the Android notification tray. Instead you can quickly access all the “Events” directly from the DTEK home screen.
- The Events details will log the last ~300 events for any notifications that are enabled – unused, sensitive, background, foreground.
- Giving you more control you can now set notifications for “priority only” in system settings.
- Lastly, you can even disable notifications coming to the Android system tray but leave them going to the Events. To ensure you are kept secure the sensitive and weekly scan notifications still display in the Android notifications tray.
- Application Permission Changes
- You can now set permissions as sensitive (or leave as normal) and by default the Camera, Mic, Phone are set to sensitive by default, providing you with a notification each time they are used.
- Additionally, if a sensitive permission is accessed by an app in the background and that app has sensitive notifications turned on (a per app setting) then you will receive a priority notification from DTEK.
- Introduction of Unused Permissions
- If specific permissions have not been granted in 60 days, DTEK will highlight that and recommend the permission be turned off to reduce privacy exposure.
- Introduction of DTEK Scan
- To ensure BlackBerry is keeping you secure, a weekly scan checks the security and privacy health of your BlackBerry.
Privacy Shade
- We’ve received plenty of feedback that you love the privacy shade feature, keeping your on-screen information private from over the shoulder readers. To help extend this privacy further, when you share screenshots to people digitally BlackBerry has introduced a new feature in Privacy Shade called Redactor.
- Redactor allows you to easily remove sensitive content from a screen capture and seamlessly share it.
- To make it easy to turn on, you can access it from its own home screen icon or a persistent Android system notification menu can also be customized to allow quick and easy launching of the Redactor or Privacy Shade functions.
Power Center
- Enhanced Power Management
- You can not be notified when a background process is using too much power and choose whether you wish to stop the process or configure it to not be able to run in the background at all. Additionally, the Power Center has been enhanced to detect when a foreground application is using excessive power.
- Proactive Notifications
- Over time, Power Center will develop knowledge of the user’s typical charging patterns, what times of day they usually charge, and will advise if the current usage means you will run out of power ahead of "schedule" and allows you to adjust usage or find a way to charge sooner.
The updates will be pushed out automatically from the Google Play Store, or you can open the Google Play Store and tap on the hamburger menu in the search bar. Tap on "My apps & games." Scroll down to any of the BlackBerry apps that appear on the list of updated apps and click on "Update."
source: BlackBerry
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