[SHOBOKSHY]

(Reuters) - Research In Motion plans to provide BlackBerry users with an easy way to tap their contacts' public profiles -- including blog posts, tweets, emails and other details -- in its latest push to regain ground in the shartphone market.

The new contact management feature, which pulls in contact details from social media and other Internet sites into a single Blackberry page, will be available on RIM's next generation of smartphones that are set to launch early next year, the company said on Thursday.

RIM has seen its once dominant position in the smartphone market slip away to rivals including Apple Inc. and Samsung -- and the company's fate depends on the success of the BB10 devices.

"BlackBerry has always had this heritage of productivity ... We are just going to make it better yet again, when we launch BB10," said T.A. McCann, who is spearheading the development of the contacts and BlackBerry Messenger applications for the new platform.

The new smartphones that will replace RIM's current line-up of aging devices will run on the BlackBerry 10 operating system that is currently in development.

McCann said the built-in contacts app on BB10 will aggregate all contact information, status updates and meetings for a contact in one place. It will also pull in any current status updates from contacts on Facebook, Twitter and other places giving users a wealth of up-to-date information on their contacts.

Waterloo, Ontario-based RIM is hoping that its new line of devices will help it regain market share that has been ceded to snazzier devices such as Apple's iPhone and others that run on Google Inc's Android operating system.

McCann, who was the founder and Chief Executive of Seattle-based Gist that was acquired by RIM in early 2011, promises that BlackBerry users will get to enjoy many of Gist's innovative contact management ideas on the new BB10 platform.

McCann said many of the features have already been built into the contact management system on the latest version of the operating system that powers RIM's PlayBook tablet device.

RIM plans new contact management features on BB10 devices | Reuters

[jasonvan9]

I thought the Playbook native contacts app already does this right now as well?

[tack]

BB already has the best contacts management. This would help bring me back for sure. I am highly anticipating BB 10 features in the core BB areas of strength. They better not take any steps backwards.

[_StephenBB81]

While I think this social linkage of contact management is nice,
I'd like RIM to actually think about contact management and how people collect contacts enter contacts, and share contacts, as well as contact integration.

If one needs to manage 10 contacts from 1 company, say they change their phone system and everyone goes from 3 digits to 4 digits in their extension, no one makes this process easy, RIM your focus is Enterprise, MAKE this easy

People change jobs, you could have 1 contact who over the last 5 years has had 5 jobs, every time you update his contact info, everything else is lost, there is no contact history, when searching through your contacts for an Employee of company XYZ having former YXZ employee's show up would be helpful they might have your answer. the solution now is to create NEW contact cards when a person changes employers and mark the old ones as dormant or non current.

This is a concept I could go on about for 1000's of words, so I'm going to cut it short as it is not completely on topic, the story here is GIST users, don't worry, we've got you covered in BB10, and The PlayBook contact manager is being carried over, as expected

[JBenn911]

That will be a great feature..to a lesser extent, my Titan does that...link your contacts so you have it all in one spot and be able to hit them from any one of the connected accounts

[Admorris]

Sounds like an article about android 2 years ago. Glad they are now at least making an attempt to catch up.

Sent from my HTC One X using Tapatalk 2

[cgk]

Same with the wp7 people hub - this will bring them in line with rather than advance the competition.

[Nabooy]

Isn't this the same as the Social Feeds thingy performs like most of our devices does now?

[Rello]

Excited. I don't have a facebook or google+ account so the contacts app on the PlayBook isn't really of use for me but I had my girl enter her password just to see how it worked and it is a awesome native app. Took a little bit for some of the information to load but a huge improvement over what my 9900 has. Hopefully the next gen processors will make the contacts app even better

[Alex_Hong]

You know, i thought this is sort of similar as what is on current BBOS devices, just that the process was tedious. Go to the facebook app, then link your friends there to the contact in your phonebook. Your contact will be updated with their latest profile pictures, latest posts. Of course this works for BBM, and twitter as well. The more you link, the more info you get. Its just that with PlayBook os2.0 the process is now dead simple.

Haven't tried palm's synergy before though. This will be a nice feature to have, but definitely not a breakthrough technology that no one else is doing.

[ALToronto]

I'd like to see more done with people who are not yet contacts. Say someone calls you, and the phone number is displayed. If this person has called before, I'd like to see when. And when I want to add this person to the contact list, I'd like to be able to pull in their auxiliary information, like Gmail sort of does with email addresses of people who are also on Google plus.

[sosumi11]

While I think this social linkage of contact management is nice,
I'd like RIM to actually think about contact management and how people collect contacts enter contacts, and share contacts, as well as contact integration.

If one needs to manage 10 contacts from 1 company, say they change their phone system and everyone goes from 3 digits to 4 digits in their extension, no one makes this process easy, RIM your focus is Enterprise, MAKE this easy

People change jobs, you could have 1 contact who over the last 5 years has had 5 jobs, every time you update his contact info, everything else is lost, there is no contact history, when searching through your contacts for an Employee of company XYZ having former YXZ employee's show up would be helpful they might have your answer. the solution now is to create NEW contact cards when a person changes employers and mark the old ones as dormant or non current.

This is a concept I could go on about for 1000's of words, so I'm going to cut it short as it is not completely on topic, the story here is GIST users, don't worry, we've got you covered in BB10, and The PlayBook contact manager is being carried over, as expected

This is easy. Simply link the contact to their LinkedIn page (app).

[Exnilo777]

I'd like to see more done with people who are not yet contacts. Say someone calls you, and the phone number is displayed. If this person has called before, I'd like to see when. And when I want to add this person to the contact list, I'd like to be able to pull in their auxiliary information, like Gmail sort of does with email addresses of people who are also on Google plus.

I've just started using an app called "xobni" (inbox spelled backwards). I'm still learning the features, but it may accomplish what you are looking for. So far I am very happy with it.

[aminrajabi]

I thought the Playbook native contacts app already does this right now as well?

It does. I think all the native PIM apps are very close to what BB10 is going to look like. You can even see the 'flow' features of BB10 built into the Calendar app when opening a meeting and then clicking on the attendees. I guess RIM can get away with doing this since not a lot of Playbooks out there and all these features will be new to most people.

I don't think that this is necessarily a bad thing. My PlayBook manages mail and contacts light years better than my 9810 so if I can get those features on a phone then sign me up!

[jsilvey2351]

I just downloaded xobni for my Torch 9850. I see where it scans my email, address book, etc but it doesn't populate my BBM messages. Do you know if that feature will be added later on?

[simu31]

A function which already exists on the PlayBook will be added to BB10, cool.

I'd just like to add that I'd LOVE the PlayBook's contact manager on my phone, I find it way better than the native BB phone contact manager, so this would be great

Si.

[Blackberry_boffin]

Isn't this the same as the Social Feeds thingy performs like most of our devices does now?

Its actually more like the PlayBook Contacts app.
Built by the same people anyway.
It can be a nightmare to go through if the name you assign anyone is different to that they use in their various media. You start getting a lot of duplication. Am just hoping it has been streamlined in BB10.

[cgk]

Its actually more like the PlayBook Contacts app.
Built by the same people anyway.
It can be a nightmare to go through if the name you assign anyone is different to that they use in their various media. You start getting a lot of duplication. Am just hoping it has been streamlined in BB10.

Can you not simply link multiples together like you can on WP?

[Alex_Hong]

Its actually more like the PlayBook Contacts app.
Built by the same people anyway.
It can be a nightmare to go through if the name you assign anyone is different to that they use in their various media. You start getting a lot of duplication. Am just hoping it has been streamlined in BB10.

You can simply link them together. For this I don't blame RIM/Gist or Microsoft at all. I too have friends who like to use weird names on their social network profiles, not their actual names. Like a supposed "Stanford Lee", becomes "Stan WhateverTheFTheyWantItToBe". That's where the app is unable to associate the account. For those that use the actual proper name throughout all their accounts, the app is able to make the connection without much issues.

The process of linking them is pretty similar on both WP and PlayBook.

Sent from RIMpire BlackBerry using the force