Research In Motion attempts to increase BlackBerry battery life

Research In Motion, the Canadian manufacturer behind the immensely popular BlackBerry smartphone range, is attempting to expand the number of on-network services in order to increase battery life.

The development comes as smartphone manufactures such as Apple come under fire for short battery cycles, with power sucked up by power-hungry wireless services.

RIM vice president of product management Tom Goguen told ITNews.com.au that new corporate social networking and new types of location services incorporated into BlackBerry servers will help keep battery life free.

“It’s really over-designed from that perspective. Whenever we look at doing something, we’re thinking about more than just how do you build a sexy app and great experience, it’s how do you do it in such a way that we’re not going to kill those key attributes like battery life.”

“It’s an approach that we are making more general so that we can allow third party developers to come in and leverage that infrastructure, so you get more than just the BES and the secure data channel: you also have an app server that’s going to present web services like interfaces to your network that you can leverage to build interesting experiences on your device while also maintaining the attributes like battery life.”