BlackBerry Messenger

During RIM's annual shareholder conference today, RIM CEO Thorsten Heins spent quite a bit of time highlighting items on RIM to-do list before BlackBerry 10 launches. One of the items he made mention of was the focus and expansion of BlackBerry Messenger on BlackBerry on BlackBerry smartphones.

For years now, BlackBerry Messenger has never really advanced much despite over 60% of the BlackBerry userbase making use of it but recently their has been new features brought to the platform. A noted by Heins, that will continue in BlackBerry 10 with the addition of video calling/chat and even further advancements of BBM Connected applications.

Although there was talk of possibly licensing Blackberry Messenger out to other vendors, RIM CEO Thorsten Heins has made it clear on more than one occasion now that BBM is something RIM wants to keep for itself. How leveraging BlackBerry Messenger will help RIM in the longrun remains to be seen but video chat integration is something that a lot of folks have been asking for for quite some time and now, RIM looks to be getting things prepared to finally deliver it.

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