After years of requests, Blackberry is finally bringing BBM – their one-time incredibly popular messaging app – to multiple platforms. Yes, BBM is coming to Android this summer. And…yeah. Isn’t it too late, Blackberry? There are dozens of high-quality messaging apps on the planet that have already consumed people’s lives. Plus, Google is about to release Hangouts (formerly Babel) as a unified messaging service to the masses that will gobble up all sorts of the messaging pie.

Announced this morning at Blackberry Live, BBM for Android (and iOS) will have groups and voice chat and screen share and all that jazz at some point, plus it should work on anything Android 4.0 and above, but come on, it doesn’t matter anymore. Just like with their hardware, it took Blackberry 3 years too long to capitalize on something good.

Via:  Blackberry

According to a report out of the Wall Street Journal, RIM is no longer looking to license its BlackBerry Messenger client to other platforms and will instead focus on creating additional features for it while pushing BlackBerry 10 and new devices. This move comes as somewhat of a shocker to many, as purported pictures of the service running on Android devices have appeared a couple of times now. There have also been countless rumors over the last year which suggested that RIM may try to leverage the popularity of the service to make some money for the company as their sales and market share continue to fall off cliffs.

My thoughts? Who cares. RIM had a chance to port this service over to Android and iOS a couple of years ago when it actually was still popular, but failed to do so. It’s just another sign of a company that may no longer be with us in a couple of years – one that has made the wrong move over and over again.

Seriously ask yourself, would you all of a sudden switch your messaging life over to BBM should it launch on Android today? You have lived without it for years now, is it really an app that you need to survive? Had RIM made the move to license it back in 2009 when everyone was migrating from BlackBerry devices over to Android and iPhones, it would have been a big deal. Now, not so much.

Via:  WSJ

The longer the BlackBerry Messenger app takes to come out, the more we get the feeling it is losing the hype factor. Back when there was a large influx of people switching from RIM to Android, this could have been highly useful, but now that the first reports of its existence were all the way back in March of 2011, we don’t know if there will be much praise when a release finally happens. Either way, as we can see in the picture above, a much newer build version 0.8.87 compared to the previous 0.4.5.5 is out and about with testers.

According to the source, launch is expected sometime later this year, but there was no hint as to exactly when. Do we have any ex-RIM users that can’t wait for the launch?

Via: Techno Buffalo

How many of you previous BlackBerry owners would love for the BB Messenger app to finally hit Android? Thanks to a tipster over at TechnoBuffalo, maybe we aren’t as far away from one as RIM would have us think. As we can see, there seems to be a beta version of the BlackBerry Messenger app floating around in tester’s hands and hopefully that means it will be in our hands soon too.

Interesting, if real, that RIM would take undoubtedly one of their most popular features and then stick it on a competitor’s device. But hey, no one will complain.

Via: TechnoBuffalo

The boys at BGR, who have a pretty good track record when it comes to Blackberry rumors, dropped some knowledge on a situation that should bring a smile to the faces of all former BBM users.  According to their sources, RIM is planning to release a version of Blackberry Messenger (BBM) to other platforms including Android.  And if it does, everyone’s favorite former messaging app will likely have a pricetag attached to it and might not include all of the fun features that real Blackberry owners enjoy, but it’ll still let you all chit chat with each other.  Their sources dropped a lot of mights into this story, so we’re not sure that this is anywhere close to happening and could just be upper exec talk at this time.  Still, it’s at least a little titillating.

Source:  BGR

Cheers nathan!