Bbm

A few minutes ago BlackBerry announced BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) for iOS. With that announcement, every single one of Apple's major mobile competitors now makes apps for iOS. Google, who also has Android, makes many very popular apps including Gmail, Maps, Google+, etc. Microsoft, who also has Windows Phone, makes a bunch of apps and games for iOS, including OneNote and Kinnectimals. Nokia, Microsoft's primary Windows Phone partner, also makes Here Maps.

Now, BlackBerry makes BBM.

Apple, by contrast, makes precisely nothing for Android, Windows Phone, or BlackBerry. Not even iTunes.

Interesting.

Rumors of Reseach In Motion's iconic BlackBerry Messenger app wriggling its way over to iPhone may be coming to an end. Anonymous sources have claimed that new CEO Thorsten Heins shut down the idea of licensing BlackBerry Messenger to carriers and manufacturers as soon as he stepped in, and was actually against RIM doing any kind of licensing at all. Apparently the issue was "not up for discussion", according to the source. It's unfortunate that he made that call early on, considering he openly admitted to looking into licensing deals during the last quarterly conference call. Ex co-CEO Jim Balsillie was previously rumored to champion BBM on other platforms, a project which new sources claimed was called SMS 2.0 internally. They had even acquired a small company called LiveProfile to work on it.

How does Apple's brand new iOS 5 iMessage compare to the stalwart Blackberry BBM on BB OS 6? Check out the video above as Kevin Michaluk and Bla1ze from CrackBerry.com bring their Berrys to the table against the iPhone for a one-on-one instant messaging show down! Does BlackBerry still own the crack, or has iOS just become leader of the pack?

BBM is far more functional -- I joked it's like the FaceBook of IM with groups, comments, and more -- while iOS keeps things really simple and bundles it right into the SMS/MMS app.

They're both really snappy, both show writing and delivered states, and offer read receipts, and both are proprietary (yeah) so no cross-platforming yet. BBM is a huge lock-in on BlackBerry and might be the same on iOS.

Could this be enough to make RIM finally bring BBM to iOS? Which would you prefer?

It's that time of year again and WWDC 2011 is upon us. We have our iOS want list up and if This Is My Next actually does have a credible source, we may be able to check off quite a few things.

Here's a list of changes from their source:

• Messaging - The word is that Apple is readying its own MMS / SMS protocol which will be a native part of the phone. We’re not entirely clear on how this would work, but apparently it will be able to automatically identify iOS users and route the message accordingly.