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.
Little information has been disclosed about the deal, with the terms, including the acquisition price being kept private.
RIM faces intensifying competition as consumers flock to main rivals that offer a superior user experience that include better media features and far more superior applications to choose from.
In Q1 of the current fiscal year, Research In Motion missed internal guidance forecasts as the company reported lower than expected total revenue of $4.2-billion. Additionally, RIM shipped fewer units and netted fewer new subscribers than expected.
Research In Motion is also set to launch its latest BlackBerry Torch device, which offers a large screen with a slide-out keyboard (including a on-screen keyboard).
The BlackBerry Torch is the first BlackBerry smartphone to be powered by RIM’s new operating system, BlackBerry 6, which offers integrated social networking with RSS alerts, a browser that is built with the WebKit browser which is the same platform the iPhone, Palm, and Android devices use.
The RIM stock (TSE:RIM) is trading up over 2.34-percent at $51.11 per share in mid-day trading.