RIM confirms NFC for nearly all future BlackBerry devices

RIM's UK managing director has reiterated the firm's commitment to match the industry trend for near-field communications (NFC) by incorporating the technology into virtually all of its future devices.

Stephen Bates talked up the capabilities of NFC at a Westminster Forum event on Tuesday, outlining RIM's vision of incorporating the technology into many, if not all, upcoming handsets.

"NFC is going to open up new technologies in the mobile environment, and the opportunities are endless. As such, we are going to deploy NFC in virtually all our devices, and will build ecosystems to exploit this technology," he said.

Apple has already promised that its next generation iPhone and iPad devices will follow Google's Nexus S in having NFC built in, while the GSMA is predicting adoption of the technology will rocket in the coming year.

Bates explained that 2010 was RIM's best ever year, and argued that its customers are interacting with popular social networking sites far more than on rival platforms owing to the way the company delivers access to the sites.

"We have more Twitter users on BlackBerry than any other platform, and Facebook has told us that people on BlackBerry devices interact with the site more than on any other platform," he said.

"This is due to the success we have had in harnessing the use of social networking to deliver an immersive experience on our devices for instantaneous communication."

Bates also talked up RIM's security credentials, claiming that the company is the single biggest supplier of government mobile services, with some 160,000 users in central and local government departments.

The BlackBerry PlayBook tablet, meanwhile, offers the most complete web experience by running the full desktop versions of web sites, including rich media content, according to Bates.

"As people consume more media they want to access the web in a format as though it was on the desktop, so we support Flash and HTML which makes the PlayBook the first tablet really enabled for a pure web experience as nothing is compressed or re-rendered," he said.