RIM plans new contact management features on BB10 devices

REUTERS

TORONTO: Research In Motion (RIM) plans to provide BlackBerry (BB) users with an easy way to tap their contacts’ public profiles — including blog posts, tweets,

e-mails and other details — in its latest push to regain ground in

the smartphone market.

The new contact management feature, which pulls in contact details from social media and other internet sites into a single BB page, will be available on RIM’s next generation of smartphones that are set to launch early next year, the company said on Thursday.

RIM has seen its once dominant position in the smartphone

market slip away to rivals including Apple Inc and Samsung — and the company’s fate depends on

the success of the BB10 devices.

“BlackBerry has always had this heritage of productivity. We are just going to make it better yet again, when we launch BB10,” said TA McCann, who is spearheading the development of the contacts and BB Messenger applications for the new platform.

The new smartphones that will

replace RIM’s current line-up of aging

devices will run on

the BB 10 operating system that is currently in development.

McCann said the built-in contacts app on BB10

will aggregate all contact

information,

status

updates and meetings for a

contact in one place. It will also pull in any current status updates from contacts on Facebook,

Twitter and other places giving users a wealth of up-to-date

information on their contacts.

Waterloo, Ontario-based RIM is hoping that its new line of devices will help it regain market share that has been ceded to snazzier devices such as Apple’s iPhone and others that run on Google Inc’s Android ope-rating system.

McCann, who was the founder and chief exe-

cutive of Seattle-based Gist that was acquired by RIM in early 2011, promises that BB users will get to enjoy many

of Gist’s innovative contact

management ideas on the new BB10 platform.

McCann said many of the

features have already been built into the contact management

system on the latest version of

the operating system that powers RIM’s PlayBook tablet device.