RIM has announced it is to partner with London-based digital music provider 7digital to power music downloads on its new BlackBerry Playbook tablet, expected to launch within the coming weeks. 7digital’s Music Store will come pre-installed on the BlackBerry PlayBook at launch, starting in North America and rolling out to other regions later this year. The move demonstrates RIM’s commitment to providing its users with a dedicated music service, providing competition to iTunes in the process....

Research In Motion (RIM) has raised eyebrows in Southeast Asia after announcing that it has chosen Malaysia as the site for its regional BlackBerry manufacturing centre. The move has shocked many in Indonesia who, given the significance of the market for RIM, had expected that the firm would tap the Southeast Asian giant – whose population exceeds 220 million – to further strengthen its brand and market position whilst generating jobs and investment in the country....

Here’s the down side when you own a publicly-traded company — At some point you have to tell everyone what’s been going on. For RIM, that day is today and the results are not pretty. How un-pretty? Here’s a rundown: For a company in RIM’s shoes, this is far from good. Analysts, according toAll Things D, had been forecasting EPS in the neighborhood of $.75 to $1.05, so the $.63 actual number is far below expectations....

It looks like RIM is finally going to introduce its own version what many third-parties have been trying to implement across smartphone platforms, by introducing its BlackBerry Messenger service on both iOS and Android. Sources close to the matter toldBGRthat the messaging software could be made free to all users, with RIM charging either a one-time or yearly fee to access the BlackBerry Messenger service via a third-party platform. RIM’s move follows numerous attempts by application developers to introduce a similar service to BlackBerry Messenger that works across all platforms....

Having announcedofficial support for Android applicationsbefore it released its PlayBook tablet, RIM has started to detail the features that will be available when its compatibility layer goes live. If you were hoping for full-featured Android apps and services, think again. Speaking at DroidCon, as part of the Eastern European Mobile Monday Developer Summit in Romania, RIM engineers explained that whilst the BlackBerry Runtime for Android Apps will support a number of Android apps on the BlackBerry OS and future QNX platform, many key features will be missing....