SiliconBeat

(updated below)

VentureBeat’s Paul Boutin reports today on a new smartphone sales report, but methinks he missed the real news.

The new data comes from IDC. Boutin makes much of the fact that according to IDC’s report — at least as quoted by him; I’ve only seen the press release, not the full report — the BlackBerry Curve was the top-selling smartphone in the United States last quarter, outselling the iPhone 3G S.

“Despite all the buzz, attention and money thrown at iPhones and anything to do with iPhones, the new iPhone 3G S came in second,” Boutin writes.

Read the rest of this entry »

There’s a new app store on the Internet block.

Research In Motion today announced the BlackBerry App World, its answer to Apple’s successful App Store for the iPhone. And it joins Google’s Android Market in the race among software makers to create new reasons to own smart-phones beyond e-mail. Microsoft is planning to open its own online app store for its Windows Mobile operating system later this year.

Initially, RIM expects 1,000 apps to be posted on its site. It has a ways to go to catch up to Apple, whose App Store now is believed to have some 31,000 programs.

BlackBerry app developers will get 80 percent of royalties, while those who write programs for the iPhone keep 70 percent.

RIM said the applications will be a mix of business programs and fun things.

Blackberry maker Research-In-Motion and four of its top executives were charged today by the Securities and Exchange Commission with backdating millions of stock option grants over an eight year period from 1998 through 2006. In its complaint, the SEC alleges that RIM’s former Chief Financial Officer Dennis Kavelman, former finance Vice President Angelo Loberto, and Co-Chief Executive Officers James Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis (pictured here with the Blackberry Pearl) illegally granted undisclosed, in-the-money options to RIM executives and employees, and that they “made false and misleading disclosures about how RIM priced and accounted for options, and that the illicit backdating provided the executives and other employees with millions of dollars in undisclosed compensation.”

The executives are specifically accused of Read the rest of this entry »