Not that long ago RIM’s BlackBerry was the most popular smartphone in the world. It’s a bit hard to believe now, with the immense popularity of the iPhone and Android devices, but at one time the BlackBerry was the king of the mobile world. I had several, and I loved them.

One of the features that made BlackBerry so popular, other than how well it handled email, was BlackBerry Messenger. In case you’re not familiar, BBM is a service that allows BlackBerry users to send direct messages, chat in real time and more. It works pretty much like Apple’s iMessage and FaceTime do in iOS or OS X.

Like iMessage and FaceTime, which are only available on Apple devices, BBM has always been BlackBerry-only. That is, until now.

RIM announced today that BBM will launch this Summer for Apple’s iPhone and for Android devices. The announcement came during the company’s BlackBerry Live conference, which is going on this week.

While I believe this will be a welcome development for some people still stuck in 2005, I need to ask this question: Who cares?

With other messaging services like iMessage, WhatsApp and Google’s upcoming Hangouts, this announcement isn’t going to make much of a difference to anyone. I don’t think it’s BBM on iOS or Android that’s going to bring people back to the BlackBerry in droves.

Sadly, at this point, I don’t think much of anything will.

RIM, maker of the popular BlackBerry line of smartphones, unveiled a brand-new tablet computer today they are dubbing ‘PlayBook.’ The company made the big announcement at their BlackbBerry DevCon, held at Moscone Center in San Francisco. Yes, the same venue Apple used to announce it’s iPad, among other products.

Quite a bold move and perhaps telling that RIM would choose to follow in Apple’s footsteps in such a manner. With RIM losing market share every quarter to the likes of Apple’s iPhone and the numerous popular Android smartphones out there, the company is facing pressure to innovate and regain a competitive advantage.

The newly-announced PlayBook will run on the new BlackBerry Tablet OS and is being positioned as the first ‘enterprise-ready’ tablet computer. Instead of using the recently-overhauled Blackberry OS 6, RIM decided to leverage their recent acquisition of QNX Software, who originally coded the new platform.

Features-wise, the PlayBook sports a 7″ screen (same as the Samsung Galaxy Tab – which we’ve covered extensively), a dual-core 1Ghz processor, front and rear HD cameras and is capable of multi-tasking and running flash-based applications. The PlayBook is uber thin and sexy, weighing in at 0.9 pounds and 9.7 mm thin.

It can be somewhat puzzling to understand why Blackberry has such a commanding share of the smartphone market. That is, until you realize that corporate IT departments are notoriously slow to change and adopt new tech and RIM has always offered features that corporate America feels they cannot find in other mobile platforms. At least until recently.

You see, both Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android OS have started to encroach on RIM’s few competitive advantages of late, offering stodgy corporate IT folk the secure Microsoft Exchange Server e-mail and calendar support they require. Predictably, Blackberry’s growth has stalled in recent quarters as iPhones and Android-powered smartphones start to find their way into executive’s hands.

That said, the latest smartphone from RIM has a decidedly more consumer-oriented feature set, designed to offer the features that are fast becoming the standard in mobile handsets. For the first time, the new Blackberry 6 OS will offer a real web browser with tabbed browsing and the official BlackBerry app store, ‘App World’ will be preloaded on the Torch, allowing users to explore and download apps direct to their device.

Have I piqued your interest? Hit the jump for all of the details on the latest Blackberry device and OS.

During Apple’s recent iPhone 4 press conference, they made some pretty hefty claims about other smartphones having similar problems as the iPhone 4, including devices manufactured by HTC, Blackberry, and Nokia. Devices that they singled out, such as the HTC Droid Eris and HTC Nexus One, supposedly have their own history of reception problems.

Apparently I wasn’t the only one who heard this and went “Huh?”, as I have had no reception issues with my recently purchased HTC Droid Incredible, because HTC has started fighting back with numbers of their own.

While only 0.55 percent of calls received by Applecare are about the iPhone 4’s reception issues, HTC’s numbers were at a measily 0.016 percent of calls about the HTC Droid Eris. Though the phone was recently discontinued, it has been out far longer with fewer complaints than Apple claims to have received.

Regardless, any issues that the iPhone 4 has cannot be compared to phones like the HTC Eris, as its antenna is located on the top of the phone while most new smartphones have them on the bottom.

Nokia and RIM have both commented on the situation on their own, but Nokia stressed that reception interference due to human hands was a problem across the smartphone market and wasn’t limited to just Apple and the iPhone 4. Regardless of what phones have this problem, it’s unfair for Apple to just say “It’s ok that our phone has a reception problem, because these phones do too”, without first looking at the numbers.

A new report from comScore on U.S. Mobile Subscriber Market Share reveals some interesting statistics for both domestic cell- and smart-phone users. For fans of Google’s open-source Android Platform, the good news is that Android is continuing to grab ever-larger shares of the U.S. smartphone market. With the sheer number of outrageously great Android-based smartphones being released in 2010, it makes sense that devices based on Google’s OS would jump a healthy 4.0% over the previous period.

Over 234 million Americans age 13 and older are currently using mobile devices and comScore’s report ranked mobile equipment manufacturers (OEMs), smartphone operating system (OS) platforms in the U.S. according to their share of current mobile subscribers, and finally mobile content usage (how mobile device owners used their devices).

In terms of top manufacturers of mobile devices, manufacturer Samsung ranked as the top OEM with 22.4 percent of U.S. mobile subscribers, up one percentage point from the preceding three month period. LG ranked second with 21.5 percent share, followed by Motorola (21.2 percent share), RIM (8.7 percent share, up 0.5 percentage point) and Nokia (8.1 percent share).

Of all mobile device users, 49.1 million people in the U.S. owned smartphones during the three months ending in May, up 8.1 percent from the corresponding February period. RIM, with their business-friendly Blackberry phones was the leading mobile smartphone platform in the U.S. with 41.7 percent share of U.S. smartphone subscribers, followed by Apple with 24.4 percent share and Microsoft with 13.2 percent.

Google saw significant growth during the period, up 4.0 percentage points to capture 13.0 percent of smartphone subscribers, while Palm rounded out the top five with 4.8 percent. Despite losing share to Google Android, most smartphone platforms continue to gain subscribers as the smartphone market overall continues to grow.

Feeling left out of the Twitter fun as a user of a Blackberry device? Are you a bit jealous of your iPhone and Android using friends who get to have fun using the official Twitter app for their respective devices? If so, your day has finally come because the folks at Twitter have released the “official” app for Blackberry too.

Late last night, Twitter for BlackBerry smartphones started to roll out into a full launch. The application reportedly features many user requested bug fixes, tweaks and feature additions received from users during the app’s long Beta period.

Here’s what you can expect from this app:

“Go to User” – the ability to access any user’s profile from anywhere in the application using auto-complete functionality for followers.
Push Notifications for Direct Messages
Timeline Support
Following and Followers
Posting, Sending, Deleting , Replying and Retweeting Tweets
User/Saved/Keyword/Proximity Search
Tweet Photos/Links
Trending Topics
Seamless integration into core BlackBerry applications
URL Shortening
Auto-Update

It looks like Amazon isn’t going to simply wait around while Apple’s iPad and iPhone kill their eBook market. Instead, they are expanding beyond Apple and RIM and into the Android market by bringing their Kindle reader to the platform.

They already have an application for the iPhone, iPad and Blackberry and now they are planning to release one for Android powered smartphones. The Android app will look like its iPhone counterpart and include the the ability to read, preview, and purchase books from Amazon’s Kindle bookstore. You will also be able to navigate with a finger flick and sync reading progress across all supported platforms — which is a nice feature if, like me, you have several platforms.

The app is reportedly also compatible with popular Android handsets including the Moto DROID, Nexus One, HTC Droid Eris and HTC Incredible. Look for it in the Android Market soon. You can also sign up at Amazon to be notified when it becomes available.

By way of its Inside BlackBerry blog, RIM has put the world on notice — BlackBerry Desktop Manager is coming to OS X in September. Yes, its finally happening after many, many years. I know you never thought it would happen but it is. We had our doubts also but glad they were finally put to rest.

Here’s some highlights of the new features:

* Sync your iTunes playlists, calendars, contacts, notes and tasks.

* Add/Remove applications.

* Update your device when new software becomes available.

* Backup and restore your device data with such features like automatically scheduled backups and optional encryption.

* Manage multiple devices.

When this software finally comes out at least Mac users finally won’t have to resort to less-than-perfect solutions to sync their Blackberry with their Mac. Make sure to check out www.blackberry.com/mac and sign up to get notified when the software is available, and stay tuned for more info on this software as we get closer to the release date.