urShadow's Blog: Five Tip Friday – BBM Tips and Tricks

Happy Friday! To kick off the weekend here are some popular BBM Tips and Tricks that you may want to take advantage of!

Retract messages using BBM for BlackBerry 10, Android & iPhone

Did you now that you can now retract messages sent using BBM? This feature can help prevent some awkward conversations like sending ‘Love you sweetie pie’ to a coworker or friend instead of your significant other!

Retracting a message is really easy, too. Just tap and hold the message you’d like to retract and you’ll see a Retract Message option appear along the right.

BBM for Android Widget

Whenever I meet up with a friend who uses BBM for Android I always ask if they have tried out the BBM widget because it’s a really fast way to access your BBM conversations. To try it out, look for the BBM chat widget in the Apps page under the Widgets tab. You can also resize the BBM widget by tapping and holding it on your home screen followed by adjusting the size using the resize bars ☺

Enable Chat History

By default, using the End Chat option will close a chat and delete the conversation history. You can turn on the Save Chat History feature if you want to save the content of your BBM chat. Doing so will allow you to view your previously sent and received messages with a BBM contact, even after you have ended a chat with them.

Using BlackBerry 10

Open BBM and swipe down from the top of the screen
Tap Settings and toggle the Save Chat History switch

Using BBM for Android, iPhone

Open BBM and tap followed by Settings
Set the Save Chat History switch to On

Using BBM for Windows Phone

Open BBM and tap in the bottom right corner
Tap settings and followed by chats
Set Save chat history to On

Tip: To learn more check out our post on how to save precious memories using BBM Chat History!

Note: Chat history is only saved locally and does not allow you to recover your chat history if you reinstall BBM or move BBM to a new device.

Contact List or Contact Grid, you decide!

When you sign into BBM you’ll notice that your contacts are displayed in a listing, but you can have your contacts shown in a grid layout, instead.

Using the listing option makes it easy to see a contact’s status message, but if you would rather have a bigger view of their display picture, consider using the grid option.

To find which view you prefer most, complete the following steps.

Using BlackBerry 10

Open BBM and swipe down from the top of the screen
Tap Settings and within Contacts Layout, select Grid or List

Using BBM for Android, iPhone

Open BBM and tap in the bottom right corner
Tap Settings and within Contacts Layout, select Grid or List

Using BBM for Windows Phone

1. Open BBM and switch to the contacts view
2. Tap in the bottom right corner followed by list / grid

Hide the Timed Messages icon

With the introduction of Timed Messages for those using BBM on BlackBerry 10, Android or iPhone, a new icon was added to the chat screen that allows you send a Timed Message.

Tip: Check out Get the new BBM for Privacy, Control and Much, Much More on Inside BlackBerry to learn more about Timed Messages!

If you don’t use the Timed Messages feature, you can optionally hide the Timed Messages icon.