14 DAY TRIAL // Starting with the next week, owners of Windows Phone devices out there should be able to enjoy the features and capabilities of BBM, as the app will become publicly available.
At the moment, BBM for Windows Phone is in private beta, and only a select few have received access to it.
On Friday, however, BlackBerry announced that the application was ready to become generally available and revealed that this would happen as soon as the next week.
“Next up is BBM for Windows Phone, coming next week. When we announced the private beta a few weeks ago, all 10,000 testing slots were taken within 24 hours. The excitement is there. The numbers are there. The momentum is there,” the company notes in a blog post.
Moreover, BlackBerry explains that the Windows Phone flavor of the BlackBerry Messenger arrives on devices with the clean, modern look and feel of the mobile operating system.
Additionally, the company notes that Windows Phone users will enjoy a simple and streamlined process of signing up, signing in and adding contacts in “this version of BBM 2.0,” just as owners of iOS and Android do at the moment.
BBM will deliver the essential features on the main interface, including contacts, chats, and feeds, for a fast and simple experience while on the go.
“Contacts list both your individual contacts and any Groups you belong to. Chat lets you connect one-on-one, with multiple people, or with a BBM Group, sending text, photos, voice notes or contacts. Feeds let you and your contacts to keep up with each other’s status updates and profile photos,” BlackBerry notes.
Moving forth, the company plans on adding some more features to the mobile application, including stickers, BBM Voice, Channels, and location sharing.
Apparently, initial feedback on the BlackBerry Messenger for Windows Phone has been positive, and the company is seeing great excitement and enthusiasm for the official release.
The private beta version of BBM for Windows Phone was released on July 10, but it has already received a series of updates meant to deliver bug fixes and other improvements.
The latest of these updates resolved a crash when sending a picture larger than 16MB, as well as an issue with the group icon flickering every time a picture or picture comment was added to the group, Nokiapoweruser notes.
Other bugs resolved included one with personal messages difficult to read on low-res screens, one that prevented users from seeing what they were typing when keyboard was up, and another one that made sending a high-resolution photo a long process (almost 20 minutes.)
The latest BBM Beta for Windows Phone update also made a change to Contacts > Search, which now brings up the virtual keyboard and focuses input on the search box. However, the app still includes a series of issues, though they might be resolved before the final version arrives.