RIM Announces New Features for BlackBerry OS

RIM has announced a slate of new features for BlackBerry OS 5.0 this morning during the BlackBerry developer conference designed to close the gap against the iPhone.

Chief among them is OpenGL ES support for games with a beta vesion of the associated SDK now available for download.

Following in a similar vein is the announcement of a new plugin for the Eclipse development enviroment in order to facilitate development of more visually appealing applications and services with availability set for 2010 along with the new BlackBerry Payment Service, which will allow for microtransactions within applications similar to the implementation on the iPhone.

The famous Push service that the manufacturer is known for will also be made available to all interested parties in the middle of next year to allow the delivery of small time sensitive alerts over RIM’s network.

RIM’s partnership with Adobe on Flash support will be further extended by integrating BlackBerry compatible file export and layout options in its Creative Suite lineup of professional design software, with compatibility further extended to the consumer software line by allowing file extraction from the Blackberry to Photoshop Elements and other Adobe software.

Finally, BlackBerry Theme Studio is now available for download which simplifies theme creation with support for changing home screen layout, fonts, icons, colors, cursors, and other options.

The application supports BlackBerry OS 4.2.2 and higher which means that current devices on the market from the 8100 Pearl to the 9700 will be compatible with themes created by the software, with RIM announcing that themes can now be submitted to BlackBerry App World.