The Ontario-based maker of the popular BlackBerry smartphone, Research In Motion (RIM) Inc., today released a new conferencing application, BlackBerry Mobile Conferencing, exclusive to its BlackBerry platform that easily facilitates organizing conferences among a small group of people.
The application is aimed at small business BlackBerry users that could use the application to seamlessly schedule conference calls between participants with invites. The app could then automatically dial in participants, and re-connects dropped calls back to the conference through a sleek new notifications interface.
The application integrates with native BlackBerry apps, including the calendar app, and could also sync with other services like both Google Apps and Microsoft Office, but that more comprehensive integration is not as easily done since it requires a knowledgeable IT person to make the integration.
Although the application works well for its intended purpose, other third party applications offer the same and more features with support for different mobile platforms in an even sleeker and more intuitive user interface.
RIM has seen slumping demand for its smartphone as consumers opt to other mobile platforms like Apple’s iOS and Google Android in favor for a superior user experience and support for more third party applications.
Developers argue (see this open letter rant from developer Jamie Murai that went viral) the BlackBerry platform is more difficult to create applications for, while many developers have explicated boycotted producing apps for the platform.
RIM recently created various apps internally (and should continue to do so) in a bid to increase available apps for its platform and made them available free of charge in BlackBerry App World. However, those applications, like the RSS reader app BlackBerry News Feeds, pale in comparison to similar applications available on other platforms.
BlackBerry Mobile Conferencing is available free of charge through the BlackBerry Beta Zone.