CTIA: Blackberry aims for consumer appeal

SAN FRANCISCO – Research in Motion (RIM)’s line of Blackberry smartphones has always been the staple of the enterprise, but with a slew of consumer-focused announcements and a keynote address by co-CEO Jim Balsillie largely focusing on Blackberry’s entertainment and multimedia appeal, the manufacturer appears to be delving deeper into its consumer focus.

Before this week’s show even started, RIM unveiled the new Blackberry Pearl Flip 8220, the company’s first ever flip phone. Balsillie told attendees that he thinks RIM will be the first to crack the code of combining the smartphone and flip phone – what 70% of consumers prefer in terms of design. RIM also launched a push-to-talk iDEN phone with Sprint, the first P2T device to include WiFi. The handset, which combines what Balsillie called white- and blue-collar capabilities, seemingly to appeal to those consumers outside of the technology’s loyal user base of field workers.

Balsillie centered his keynote on the convergence of consumers’ four screens – the home phone, cell phone, Internet and TV. As consumers increasingly want their payloads unified at the presentation layer, RIM is looking to achieve this through a slew of communication and entertainment-focused additions to the Blackberry line. The company today announced native support for AOL, which had previously been missing from its lineup of GChat, Yahoo IM and Windows Live Messenger platforms. Coming off its recent success with Facebook on Blackberry, which has had over 2.5 million downloads since it was announced at the last CTIA, the fastest uptake of any RIM app ever – RIM also announced today that it will partner with MySpace to bring a similar social networking service to Blackberrys.

“It is remarkable when this is in a push, connected, event-driven basis,” Balsillie said in his keynote address. “When you change your access to information, you change your relationship to it – not incrementally but on a quantum basis. These changes are tremendously exciting.”