The Waterloo, Canadian-based maker of the BlackBerry smartphone, Research In Motion (RIM), is having final negotiations with top-level officials from the government of India in an attempt to satisfy security concerns that would avoid a nation wide ban of the BlackBerry.

In the most recent developments today, Research In Motion offered the government of India to organize and lead an industry wide forum on mobile communications and privacy, and their relationship with national security.

The government of India argues the BlackBerry platform is the only communication medium in the country that currently cannot be monitored, and that terrorists and criminals could use the messaging phone to freely communicate securely without worrying about government monitoring.

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The Canadian maker of the BlackBerry smartphone, Research In Motion Limited (RIM), has confirmed it’s latest acquisition, this time the company cellmania, which develops mobile application store infrastructure.

It is widely believed RIM made the acquisition as the company pushes to make its platform more attractive to the consumer segment by making available more comprehensive and diverse applications for its BlackBerry smartphone.

Cellmania offers a broad range of features for its app store platform, including the ability to fully manage billings, push downloads and media over-the-air, digital rights management (DRM), and other content management features and reports.

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Research In Motion (RIM) Corp., the Ontario-based maker of the BlackBerry smartphone, has reached an agreement with the Saudi government, preventing the banning of core BlackBerry features.

The Saudi government claimed core BlackBerry features present sufficient risk to national security that it would have been forced to disable the key features for all users in the country, including for all foreigners traveling to the Kingdom.

The features in question include both BlackBerry Internet Service (BIS) and BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES), including BlackBerry Messenger, email, and browsing.

The Saudi’s claimed (including many more nations like India, and the United Arab Emirates, among others) that the platform is far too secure where government officials are not able to monitor BlackBerry data.

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During Apple’s held press conference yesterday that explained the antenna issues with the latest iPhone 4, the company alleged other smartphones also have similar connectivity issues if the devices are held in certain ways.

Apple specifically made these claims against Research In Motion (RIM), the company behind the BlackBerry, including other top phone makers like Nokia, Samsung, and High Tech Computer Corporation (HTC).

Today, both Nokia and RIM published statements debunking Apple’s claims against their products.

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Today the search giant, Google, updated its Google Maps application for BlackBerry devices to version 4.2 that includes support for Google’s latest mapping project, Google Maps Bike, which allows users to get directions optimized for biking.

The new program offers users the ability to plan routes based on bike trails (indicated by dark green), dedicated bike lanes (indicated by light green), or by regular roads that are good for biking (indicated on the map by a dotted green line).

Google firstly made the biking feature available for Google Android-based mobile devices, and today made the application available for BlackBerry devices as well.

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BlackBerry WES 2010 April conference where BlackBerry 6 was unveiled

Competition in the mobile space has been intensifying ever since the iPhone truly revolutionized the mobile realm, followed more recently with the Android mobile operating system developed by Google that has recently seen record sales.

Research In Motion, the maker of the popular BlackBerry enterprise centric (turned consumer friendly) messaging device has traditionally enjoyed a competitive edge (and arguably still does) over other platforms with its superior messaging capabilities, mainly seamless push e-mail and PIN messaging with BlackBerry Messenger.

RIM has traditionally been focused on developing handsets that are geared towards enterprise with an efficient and functional operating system that is designed to serve its primary purpose: mobile messaging, e-mail, and notifications.

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The market research firm IDC published a report today on global smartphone sales, indicating the market grew 56.7-percent in Q1 2010 with 54.7-million units shipped, compared to 34.9-million units shipped in the same period last year.

The smartphone market also grew by a record 38-percent in the final quarter of 2009 year-over-year.

Most notably, Apple was able to double its iPhone sales over the same period last year, as the company introduced the iPhone in emerging high-growth markets such as China.

According to the report, Apple sold 8.8-million iPhone devices, putting the company in the third top spot of global mobile vendors.

Apple is expected to unveil its latest iPhone model sometime this June, with the more redefined OS 4 that will bring many new features including multi-tasking, enhanced e-mail and personal information management, among other key enhancements.

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Google today announced the availability of its flagship Nexus One smartphone on the AT&T network and on Rogers Wireless in Canada.

The company is offering the Nexus One directly to consumers for use on either of the two networks for $529, without any telecom subsidy in sight at least for now. There is no comment from the two carriers as to whether or not they would subsidize the device.

The Nexus One is currently offered exclusively through T-Mobile in the U.S. priced at $179 on a two-year term.

Google originally announced it intended to offer a version of the Nexus One for use on the Verizon network by spring 2010. Reports today indicate the Verizon version could launch on March 23, 2010.

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The BlackBerry-maker Research In Motion (RIM) today has finally fixed a flaw that left North American users without BlackBerry Messenger, sporadic email delivery, and no web browsing yesterday and late into the morning today.

This interruption of service marks the second BlackBerry service outage in less than a week, the last one occurring on December 17.

The BlackBerry Curve was the top selling smartphone in the United States in the first quarter of 2009, giving RIM a 50-percent share of the total smartphone market in the U.S.

RIM most recently posted strong Q3 2009 earnings and added 4.4 million new subscribers in the quarter, bringing the total BlackBerry user-base worldwide to 36 million.

RIM blamed a flaw in an updated version of the BlackBerry Messenger app for causing the outage. The company is encouraging users to upgrade to the latest version 5.0.0.57 of BlackBerry Messenger. Just remember to upgrade first.

RIM spokeswoman Rachel Colley confirmed today in an email that the problem has been fixed.

A service interruption occurred Tuesday that affected BlackBerry customers in the Americas. Message delivery was delayed or intermittent during the service interruption. Phone service and SMS services on BlackBerry smartphones were unaffected. Root cause is currently under review, but based on preliminary analysis, it currently appears that the issue stemmed from a flaw in two recently released versions of BlackBerry Messenger (versions 5.0.0.55 and 5.0.0.56) that caused an unanticipated database issue within the BlackBerry infrastructure. RIM has taken corrective action to restore service.

The popular BlackBerry maker, Research In Motion (RIM), today released third quarter financial earnings that beat Wall Street expectations, sending the RIM stock surging up by about 12-percent in after hours to $70.76 (as at 5:36pm EST), up from the $63.46 market-close.

Q3 (ended November 28) earnings were $3.92 billion ($1.10 per diluted share), while Wall Street was expected $1.04 per share and up to $3.79 billion in total revenue.

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