BlackBerry to get live collaboration for calendars, contacts and more?

With the annual BlackBerry lovefest known as Wireless Enterprise Symposium due to kick off in Orlando, Florida next week, rumours are starting to swirl.

No substantially new devices are being talked up, although there’s the possibility of a second-gen Storm appearing from the pocket of RIM co-founder Mike Lazaridis during his keynote.

But CrackBerry.com has caught wind of a new app called BlackBerry Groups, which will deliver some of the collaborative tricks of an enterprise BlackBerry into the hands of everyday consumers.


A screenshot shows a simplified UI with icons for a number of services that could be shared among members of a group. These include a calendar, contacts book, task list, photo gallery and what appears to be GPS-based location.

The icon bar also includes a chat icon which indicates that the excellent yet oft-ignored BlackBerry Messenger might finally step front and centre, and an email icon which could represent some form of group messaging.

It’s worth noting that RIM has also just announced it is axing the BlackBerry Unite service. Unite was intended to deliver similar shared services to groups of up to five users – primarily a family or small business – but relied on the lukewarm backing of carriers and having a Windows PC running 24x7 to act as host for the BlackBerry Unite hub software.

BlackBerry Groups, on the other hand, is likely to sit on RIM’s central Network Operation Centre gateway through which all BlackBerry email is already routed.

All the same, we’d love to see RIM extend this to offering its own personal push email service with other personal services such as a calendar and task list plus Web-based synchronisation to multiple devices, similar to Apple’s MobileMe.