Research In Motion (RIM) will soon be launching the gold release of the BlackBerry Theme Studio 6, a free and powerful device personalization suite of tools that includes the Theme Builder for creating themes, and the BlackBerry Composer for creating animations and graphics to use in themes.

This new release of Theme Studio makes it even easier for users and professional designers to customize virtually everything, including backgrounds, sound effects and ringtones, icons and menus, and fonts. You can even add animations and screen transitions.

This comes amid a more recent revelation that Blackberry developers would be able to download the SDK’s for completing the APIs related to the device enabling many developers to become ambitious and creative on the programming front. Read more »

BlackBerry world Conference kicked off on the 3^rd of May, 2011 in Orlando Florida.

Some of the major highlights of the keynote were;

1. New exciting apps to roll out including Angry Birds – A puzzle video game developed by Finland based Rovio Mobile, inspired by a sketch of stylized wingless birds initially rolled out on the Apple’s iPhone. The App has now been ported to RIM devices and this will thankfully make a lot of game chasers very happy.

2. RIM was also joined to Adobe® – which has more than 3 million active developers who have done a lot of great things with Adobe to enable the development of high performance mobile apps for the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet. Read more »

Consumerisation*, cloud computing, tablet computing and mobile collaboration are among the major trends that will drive the market for enterprise mobility solutions over the next year.

That’s according to Robyn Milham, head of enterprise sales for Southern Africa at Research In Motion (RIM), the company behind the BlackBerry® solution. She says that many organisations have already deployed basic mobile solutions such as personal information management (PIM) and sales force automation tools to their workforces.

As a result, many of them are getting up to an extra hour of productivity a day from their employees, improving responsiveness to customers, and ensuring a faster flow of information and business processes across their organisations. Imagine the impact on a team that has eight sales representatives who spend their lives on the road – it is almost like having another full-time employee on board based on time saved. This productivity boost adds up to six weeks of productive time per employee each year.  This is in addition to a typical 20% to 30% improvement in workflow productivity in organisations that have put mobility solutions in place. “However, these early applications are just the beginning of the mobile revolution in business,” says Milham. “In the next phase, enterprises face a range of challenges and opportunities driven by trends such as consumerisation of information technology (IT), rapid adoption of social networks as a business tool and the move towards cloud computing.” Read more »

BBM (BlackBerry Messenger) Social Platform officially goes into public beta.

This means that the BlackBerry developer community can now take advantage of the powerful social aspects of the ultra popular BBM service (an active user base of over 35 million). The BBM Social Platform was first announced at the BlackBerry DEVCON 2010 (http://press.rim.com/release.jsp?id=4555).

Enhanced Developer Experience – Empowering features

With this beta release, Java developers have access to APIs and features that allow them to build important functions into their applications. They are user permission based and include accessing and updating fields in the user’s profile, creating custom areas within the user’s profile, initiating and embedding chats with friends, initiating file transfers, sharing applications virally with friends in their contact list. Read more »

London, UK and Waterloo, ON – Research In Motion (RIM) (NASDAQ: RIMM; TSX: RIM) and 7digital announced that the 7digital Music Store will come pre-installed* on the BlackBerry® PlayBook™.

The 7digital Music Store to be pre-installed on the BlackBerry PlayBook at launch in the US and Canada with further international roll out in 2011 with the purpose of letting users browse, preview and purchase tracks from a catalogue of over 13 million MP3s.

The 7digital Music Store will enable BlackBerry PlayBook users to access 7digital’s catalogue of over 13 million high quality (320kbps) MP3s. BlackBerry PlayBook users will be able to search for tracks, albums and artists and preview tracks before making a purchase. Users can also discover new music through 7digital’s recommendation technology. Read more »