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Sep. 15, 2008

RIM (Research In Motion) just pushed out a few more smartphone applications.

The company co-CEO Jim Balsillie was nothing short of bullish on the smartphone market.

Balsillie, a keynote speaker on Day Two of the CTIA convention said the highly anticipated Bold will roll out in early October.

“We’re hopeful,” he said, presumably referring to the wireless carrier certification process with AT&T.

Balsillie said RIM isn't seeing any signs of the smartphone market slowing down. He’s been in the wireless data industry for twenty years and lived through the times when pagers were cool and wireless data wasn’t.

He also humorously recalled how it “took ten years” to shake the pager label after positioning the BlackBerry as an interactive pager.

But what to do with what’s now known as smartphones? Balsillie described a number of new applications that are now available today and described RIM’s deals with Tivo, MySpace and Slacker, to name a few.

Balsillie said RIM and TiVo are bringing customized TiVo services to the BlackBerry platform, so BlackBerry users can record shows. Future collaboration will focus on software applications that further simplify mobile access to video content, the companies said in a press release.

With MySpace, RIM is developing a MySpace Mobile experience customized for the BlackBerry. That application will be available in BlackBerry markets globally. With Ticketmaster, RIM announced the BlackBerry brand was exclusively designated as the “official smartphone of Ticketmaster,” so BlackBerry users can buy tickets on the go.

With Slacker, plans are to provide a free Slacker Personal Radio application, exclusively for BlackBerry smartphones, that will enable listeners to hear their favorite Slacker radio stations wherever they go, including when not connected to a wireless network.

Microsoft and RIM also said they are working to integrate rich Live Search capabilities into the BlackBerry browser and maps.

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Source: Research In Motion.