Bits Blog: Government Agency Will Give RIM Another Chance

Robert Galbraith/Reuters Thorsten Heins, the chief executive of Research In Motion, discussing the BlackBerry 10 in September.

Perhaps there’s hope for the BlackBerrys after all. A United States government agency that had announced plans to dump the BlackBerry for the iPhone says it’s willing to give Research in Motion’s coming BlackBerry 10 smartphones a shot.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security, says it will start a pilot program early next year to test the new BlackBerry phones.

In October, the agency said it was planning to buy iPhones for its 17,600 employees and stop issuing BlackBerry devices because they could “no longer meet the needs of the agency.” But it told Reuters that it was developing mobile apps for law enforcement and looking into whether the BlackBerry 10 could come in handy in the future.

RIM introduced the new BlackBerry 10 software in May. The company has delayed the release of new BlackBerry phones with the software several times, but it appears that they will finally arrive early next year.

Scott Totzke, RIM’s senior vice president of BlackBerry security, said in a statement that the company designed the BlackBerry 10 to provide businesses with secure services and to bolster productivity.

“ICE has been a valued BlackBerry customer for years, and our commitment to government agencies has influenced the development of the BlackBerry 10 platform,” he said. He said the company would share more details about the BlackBerry 10 in an event announcing the phones on Jan. 30.

Gadgetwise Blog: Your Chance to Appear on 'Sesame Street'

Watching TV is old news. Now it can watch you back, provided you have one of two new titles in stores: Kinect Sesame Street TV or Kinect Nat Geo TV ($30 each, from Microsoft Studios).

The catch is that you need Microsoft’s $250 Xbox 360 Kinect video game system to make them work. Each title bundles television episodes from the 2011-12 season with games that invoke Kinect’s motion-sensing camera and microphone. Additional episodes, offered for sale from the main menu, cost $5 each and require both an Xbox Live account and free hard disk space.

The Sesame Street package contains two themed disks on growing up and science. Each disk contains four 30-minute episodes of the show. After you move your coffee table to the side and calibrate your Kinect, you’ll see yourself inside an on-screen mirror with Elmo or Grover, who might ask you to jump to shake coconuts from a tree or wave to pop the bubbles floating on the screen. There’s no shortage of counting, sorting and waving, as you might expect.

In the Nat Geo title (also two disks with multiple episodes), you can explore the American wilderness with Casey Anderson, a wildlife expert, by shouting at the Kinect microphone, or become an onscreen bear with head and paws. You earn points by scratching rocks to scare up moths, snapping them from the air with your mouth. A second player can jump in simply by entering the camera’s field of view, making this an excellent social experience. If you step out of the room or just get tired, your Xbox waits for about 45 seconds and then starts churning through the episode on autopilot. Call it the couch-potato mode.

Dina Lohan to Dr. Phil — I WANT A SECOND CHANCE

Dina Lohan is telling friends ... she knows she looked like a total train wreck in her recent Dr. Phil interview -- but she insists she's not an out-of-control drunk ... and she wants to prove it in a SECOND Dr. Phil interview.Sources close to D...