At the BlackBerry Jam Americas keynote this morning (-8 GMT), aside from a plethora of very sexy integrated native OS elements, RIM also showed off some of the social applications that have been developed for the BlackBerry 10 platform. According to studies done, BlackBerry users are the most socially connected users out of all the smartphone user groups and with BlackBerry 10, RIM and its partners will be giving them better tools to do so.
First up, Facebook has brought its mobile experience which is found in both iOS and Android to BB10. At a single glance, you’ll be hard pressed to tell the difference, but as you use it, or in our case, as it was demoed, you could see how much smoother and how little waiting was being done while using the app. It may look like its a catchup to the other OS’ but comparing it to what BlackBerry has at the moment, it’s a huge departure and improvement.
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The next app that was demonstrated was Foursquare. While it still retains a more or less traditional look, inline with the Foursquare apps of yore, it’s the functionality of including BBM as an avenue for posting which is new to the masses. This BBM integration will show where you check in right in your profile and will add depth to your BBM profile and contact card in the spirit of integrated information.
These are but 2 of the apps that will be available at launch and RIM has mentioned that all the major social networking sites will have an app in BB10 at launch, namely LinkedIn and Twitter as well (No Google+ Unfortunately). It will be interesting to see if the existing apps get updates of sorts to bring it close to BB10, but that’s another issue for another time.
