New BlackBerries, Skype for iPad, MDM - BYTE Wireless Radio 020

The new BlackBerries are here! The new BlackBerries are here! No, that's not Steve Martin circa 2011, it's just that Research In Motion announced officially a new version of the Storm, er Torch, a BlackBerry Bold that takes us back to that original, winning product and adds touch to the screen, and a new version of the actual Torch. All of them beefed up with faster processors and version 7 of the BlackBerry OS. Which is to say, we were a bit disappointed. We talk about why in this episode, featuring Craig Johnston (host of BWR and our resident BlackBerry expert), Todd Moore (a BYTE editor and a mobile developer), and Todd Ogasawara (also a BYTE editor and mobile expert).

Also this week, Apple approved Skype for the iPad. Todd Moore and I did some testing, and we found that it . . . Well, it worked. Isn't that good enough?! In this episode we talk about what worked well, and what didn't. Also, a new version of Skype for Android came out, and it aims to fix all of the earlier problems caused by the fragmentation of Android. Todd Ogasawara tells us why.

Mobile device management is a critical tool for managing the consumerization of IT, and to that end, we've seen a dozen or so products emerge in the past few years, none of them hotter than Mobile Iron, which announced the cloud version of its product. We discuss what Mobile Iron does and why the Connected Cloud version makes a lot of sense, even if, for now, it's a bit crippled.

Finally, AT&T and Clearwire both made some news this recently in the wireless carrier space. AT&T is going to start throttling the performance of its most bandwidth hungry users starting October 1, and Clearwire announced its intentions to overlay an LTE network on top of its WiMax network. We talked about what all of that means.

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