Research in Motion to offer Mac support for Blackberry owners

Research in Motion to offer Mac support for Blackberry owners

The makers of Blackberry PDAs, Research in Motion has announced that they are soon going to offer Macintosh platform support for their customers. They have plans to offer a Macintosh-based e-mail and calendar application for its BlackBerry handheld devices. The company has gone into collaboration with Information Appliance Associates to offer free downloads of the PocketMac program for BlackBerry.

They would further integrate this application suite in their Blackberry devices. This latest move from RIM would further increase their intrusion into the Palm territory. Palm has since long offered synchronization software for users of Apple Computer Inc.’s Mac computers with its line of handhelds and Treo smartphones.

Even the Apple Mac OS X comes preloaded with an application iSync that lets users synchronize their address and calendar information from their Macs to Palm handhelds. Blackberry users for now would have to resort to third party solutions for the same. The change would be that the application would now be available directly from the company for free. Until now, Blackberry owners had to buy PocketMac, a program for synchronizing e-mail, contacts, and calendar information from a desktop to handhelds for around USD 29.95.

Mark Guibert, vice president of corporate marketing at RIM spoke about this new initiative: “There is significant interest in BlackBerry from Mac users and we look forward to delivering PocketMac for BlackBerry to customers around the world.”