Research in Motion announced Thursday a raft of mobile multimedia partnerships and applications. The introduction of RIM’s Blackberry Pearl 8220 Flip on Wednesday was a departure from its business-focused product line, and deals with TiVo, MySpace and others confirm its attempts to appeal to the consumer marketplace.

Consumer RIM

In a joint announcement, RIM and Microsoft said they will work to integrate Microsoft’s Live Search features into the Blackberry browser and Blackberry maps. The Live Search capability, particularly

tied to Blackberry maps, will compete with other mobile location applications. Yahoo’s Fire Eagle maps restaurant searches according to your GPS position, and Yahoo’s Blueprint platform hints at geo-aware capabilities for cell phones.

The RIM-Microsoft integration is additionally expected to include Blackberry-based Hotmail and World Wide Web Messenger.

MySpace will work with RIM to develop a smartphone front end its social-networking site, so Blackberry users can access their pages on the go. According […]

Orginal post by dhiram