RIM making waves at CTIA

Yesterday, RIM made several announcements before and during the keynote by RIM’s co-CEO Jim Balsillie. He announced the Blackberry Unite and BES upgrade with PBX support. He also confirmed AT&T launch of Blackberry Bold sometime in October. Earlier in the week, RIM launched its first consumer focused flip-phone, the Blackberry Pearl Flip 8220.

In addition to that, RIM announced several new partnerships that shows that RIM is serious about playing in the consumer space:

First, RIM and TiVo tied up to allow Blackberry users to control their set-top TiVo boxes from their Blackberry smartphone anytime and anywhere, not just from in front of their TiVos. The first software application from RIM and TiVo is expected to be available later this year.

Second, they announced a tie-up with MySpace to develop an integrated MySpace Mobile experience customized for BlackBerry smartphones which will allow Blackberry and MySpace users to get instant, push-based messages from their MySpace social network on their Blackberry devices. RIM will also develop a community page on MySpace for users to access the latest BlackBerry smartphone news, content, videos, games, ringtones, skins and other unique and engaging features. The MySpace application for Blackberry will be available globally starting October 2008.

Third, RIM annouced a tie-up with Ticketmaster marks the first end-to-end mobile e-commerce solution for smartphone-based ticket purchasing in North America. The two companies will develop a seamless integration that allows BlackBerry smartphone users untethered access to browse and purchase tickets on TicketMaster sites and also tie in to Blackberry Wallet to make purchasing tickets easier. Ticketmaster also named Blackberry, the “Official Smartphone of Ticketmaster”.

Fourth, RIM announced that Slacker will provide a free Slacker Personal Radio application, exclusively for BlackBerry smartphones, that will enable listeners to listen to Slacker radio stations even when not connected to a wireless network.

Fifth, the most important annoucement was a tie-up with Microsoft to launch Live Search on Blackberry smartphones. Under this agreement, MS Live Search will be the default search engine on all Blackberry smartphones and will also provide contextual search in Blackberry Maps application. Live Search for BlackBerry Smartphones is expected to be available later this year with support for multiple languages.

Qik rolls out live video streaming to Windows Mobile devices

Soon after launching mobile clients for iPhone and Samsung i325 (ACE), Qik, the mobile video provider, has released a new client for Windows Mobile devices. The phones it is supported on are:

HTC Touch Dual

HTC Touch Diamond

HTC TyTn-II

AT&T Tilt

Sony Ericsson Xperia X1

In addition to viewing Qik hosted videos on your mobile, the software also allow users to stream live video directly from their phone.