Rumors were abound that in order to adapt and grow, RIM would be abandoning the mobile consumer space and would instead focus on what’s always been its strongest audience, the enterprise and professional market.

The rumors were sparked by Hein’s original comments in which he stated that RIM was refocusing on the enterprise market. The press and media took this statement out of context, and began speculation that RIM would no longer produce consumer related products.

“Many said that RIM will leave the consumer business- that is absolutely not true, that is not what I said.”

Heins clarified further that by his original statement, he only meant that RIM needed to stop designing as many services in-house and that they should instead try and achieve their consumer-based goals through external partnerships.

“We spend a lot of time on who are we mostly talking to, who is the target customer. The common denominator with all our customers is that they are striving to succeed.”

Heins went on to strengthen the idea of “success” which he first talked about yesterday morning during his presentation at the general session (keynote). RIM has refocused its goals to target productive Blackberry users who strive to be successful.

“When I talk about people that want to be successful that is not in any way exclusive. The design objective of Blackberry products is to help people succeed.”

Throughout the conference RIM continuously referred to it’s consumer base as “Blackberry people,” and identified them as all people who wish to succeed. It’s evident that RIM also plans to succeed. There is no reason why this new focus and “success” plan shouldn’t prevail, so long as RIM sticks to their guns.

RIM has made is abundantly clear that they want plenty of applications and content to be available for the Blackberry 10 launch later this year.

“We understand you want key content on your Blackberry when we deliver the new platform to you.”

Thorsten Heins, the CEO of RIM, identified that consumers want ample content available to them proceeding a product launch, and he clarified that RIM is dedicated to making that happen.

In order to attract developers to the dark side -okay, so that’s not politically correct- the Blackberry side, RIM gave every developer at the Blackberry 10 Jam one of the Dev Alpha devices for use during the development process.

By now you’re probably wondering how the red and blue caped crusader comes into play, keep reading, we’ll get to that.

RIM is doing more than just giving away a bunch of innovative phones to boost application development for the upcoming Blackberry 10 platform. Alec Saunders, RIM’s VP of Developer Relations, revealed that Blackberry will guarantee developers a minimum of $10,000 in annual revenue. If first year developers happen to fall short of the 10K mark, RIM will pay the difference.

But don’t for a second believe that RIM hasn’t added some stipulations in order to cover themselves. Before RIM pays for anything, the application in question must make at least $1,000 in the App store. If, and only if, the application makes its $1,000 sales mark, then RIM will play Superman and swoop in to save the day. This policy will at least form some kind of protective film for RIM, ensuring they only have to support quality apps.

Unfortunately, all you silly developers out there looking to make a quick buck with the next phone tanning app, we’re sad to report that you won’t be seeing a check from RIM anytime soon.

While we applaud RIM for adopting such an ambitious campaign, we can’t help but ponder how desperate it all seems. With this campaign RIM seems more than just desperate, they’re practically shouting to the heavens that Blackberry 10 apps will be sufficient, and we all know that a whole lot of shouting doesn’t just make things true.

If RIM maintained focus on building a great development platform, the apps would eventually come. Although, like RIM, Microsoft has also offered developers money for quality apps, so one could easily argue the counterpoint that desperation is absent and this is now a normal process.

We’re not knocking you RIM, we’re just wondering if this campaign is such a brilliant idea.

Nevertheless, the real news here is that RIM is entirely dedicated to fleshing out the application market for the Blackberry 10 product line. In fact, they’re so dedicated that they’re willing to guarantee developers $10,000 in profit.

Good luck with that RIM.

Throughout the event, we were certain of two things, RIM is backing the new features of the Blackberry 10 OS, and they are also backing NFC (Near Field Communication) technology with everything they’ve got.

According to RIM, NFC technology is the link between the physical and virtual worlds. Several times RIM employee’s stated that NFC is going to be the next biggest achievement of mobile technology since the birth of data.

A couple of demonstration booths we visited at the Blackberry Solutions Showcase utilized NFC.

At the Blackberry Music Gateway booth, a demo showed that the new gateway model takes advantage of NFC technology to connect instantly to a Blackberry mobile device.

RIM also had a booth showcasing the Blackberry office setup (it was comprised of a Playbook, a Blackberry mobile phone, a screen and wireless peripherals), and the office used NFC to communicate between various devices.

Of course, there are other practical uses for NFC technology. Allow us to paint you a picture; imagine paying at a standard checkout counter, using only your phone, by merely tapping the cash register. There are no other button presses, key strokes or screen gestures required, just a basic tap of the phone on the NFC enabled transmitter gets the job done.

Alternatively, imagine gaining entry to a 24 hour gym (which is always locked) by simply tapping a Blackberry device to an electronic lock.

The possibilities are endless, which leaves a veil of mystery shrouding the future of NFC. Even so, it’s not hard to see that NFC technology has massive amounts of potential.

We tend to agree with RIM on this one, therefore we’d love to see more NFC technology implemented in real world scenarios. Hopefully RIM can convince enough businesses to take advantage of NFC  technology before the Blackberry 10 OS is ready to launch.

Last month we found out that Telus would be launching a few new BlackBerry 7 smartphones in August and soon after that they’d be launching a total of six before October 1st. Even though RIM confirmed them as one of the carriers to offer the new devices, Telus still hasn’t made it official with their own announcement. Thanks to a new leak courtesy of MobileSyrup, we now know that Telus plans to launch the BlackBerry Torch 9810 and Torch 9860 around August 15th.

Check out a few (bigger) images of the leaked info below  showing the launch dates for each device.

MORE IMAGES!

RIM recently updated the BlackBerry Mobile Conferencing application in the BlackBerry Beta Zone. Now at beta version 1.0.0.30, the update includes some new and useful features. This app “integrates seamlessly with the Calendar on your BlackBerry smartphone to help keep you connected to important calls from almost anywhere”. Here are the changes for the new beta:

• Location of “Add Conference” button is moved up in the New Appointment screen
• Maximum number of profiles increased to 10
• Auto discovery search is improved
• Support for audio conferences profiles using Microsoft Live Meeting
• Create a conference from an email: now it just takes one click to get everyone on an email thread ready to be scheduled for a conference call. From any email, click “convert to conference” to create a new calendar appointment that already has the same subject as the email, attendees from the To and Cc line, and short clip of the email body in the appointment notes.

For more info and go get the update go to blackberry.com/beta and sign up or log in.

RIM today announced a new version of their free and official BlackBerry Podcasts application. The new version is now at 1.5 and makes it easier to find content as well as preview or play content that is currently downloading. Here are the full details for the changes in this version:

• Web podcast search
  Looking for that elusive feed? No problem – we’ve integrated Google® search. Now you can quickly search the web for podcasts and RSS feeds to supplement the built-in BlackBerry Podcast catalog. You just select “Add Podcast Channel” within the menu, then type in the feed (or keyword) you are looking for and you will invoke an RSS Google Search from within the app. Another great option is to simply cut and paste the podcast URL, if you already know it, and away you go!
• Improved Content Presentation within Categories
  We currently have over 3,000 feeds and growing – with many categories having over 100 feeds each! When presenting content within categories, the first 40 listings in each category will be “featured content” – a combination of the most popular feeds and RIM-programmed feeds. This helps you find the most compelling content first! However, if you prefer to go through all in alphabetical order, you can select “All Channels” to see all content within the category. It’s now easier than ever to find the podcast you’re looking for with v1.5 of the BlackBerry Podcast app!
• Preview or Play while downloading
  You don’t have to wait for the entire podcast to download before you can hit play to enjoy the latest feed. You can now preview or play at the same time that you are downloading, just to make sure that you’re downloading exactly what you want to hear.

For more info and to download the new version of the BlackBerry Podcasts app go to blackberry.com/podcasts or search for it in BlackBerry App World.

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