RIM Unveils BlackBerry Tag for Easy Sharing

Canadian mobile phone maker Research In Motion has just announced the availability of a new easy way for the owners of BlackBerry smartphones to share content between their devices, namely BlackBerry Tag.

Set to be included in the new BlackBerry 7 OS, BlackBerry Tag will offer users the possibility to share contact information, documents, URLs, photos and other files.

The sharing can be easily done by simply tapping the BlackBerry smartphones together, Research In Motion Co-CEO Jim Balsillie unveiled during his keynote presentation at the GITEX conference in Dubai.

Through BlackBerry Tag, friends can also easily add one another as contacts on BBM (BlackBerry Messenger), he explained.

“BlackBerry Tag is an exciting and innovative feature that makes sharing contact information and multimedia content effortless and seamless,” said Jim Balsillie, Co-CEO at RIM.

“BlackBerry Tag opens a new dimension to the BlackBerry platform that is powerful, simple and intuitive and we think it will be welcomed by both users and developers.”

The new BlackBerry Tag has been developed based on the Near Field Communications (NFC) technology.

Some of the latest devices that the Canadian handset vendor unveiled to the world, including the BlackBerry Bold 9900/9930 and BlackBerry Curve 9350/9360/9370 smartphones, do sport NFC chips inside.

The mobile phone maker also announced that these would also be the first devices to come with support for the new BlackBerry Tag.

A future BlackBerry 7 OS will bring BlackBerry Tag to the said devices. RIM did not offer info on when the software might be released, but did say that users would receive it depending on their wireless carriers.

Unfortunately, BlackBerry 7 devices that do not include NFC capabilities will not be able to provide users with the new feature.

“RIM also announced plans to expose BlackBerry Tag through APIs on the BlackBerry platform, allowing software developers to take advantage of "tap to share" functionality from within their own applications,” the company noted.