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Yahoo! Digs Into BlackBerries

Yahoo! and Research in Motion today expanded their relationship in a bid to bring more of the online portal’s services to users of RIM’s BlackBerry devices. This expanded relationship covers four areas: Yahoo! Go for Mobile, Yahoo! Search, Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Messenger.

Under the terms of the updated relationship, the two companies said, Yahoo! and RIM are working together to bring Yahoo! Go for Mobile to the BlackBerry platform. This service integrates a full range Yahoo!’s products into a single application. Upcoming Yahoo! Mail improvements will allow users to experience real-time delivery of e-mail messages sent to their Yahoo! Mail accounts and better wireless synchronization of sent and deleted items as well as read/unread message status.

For Yahoo! Search, the two companies are working to add an icon located directly on the BlackBerry’s main screen which will add one-click search access. With Yahoo! Messenger, this looks to involve the creation of a dedicated instant messaging client for RIM’s device.

“Our Yahoo! users want to access our services from all of their connected devices,” said Marco Boerries, senior vice president, connected life, Yahoo!, in a statement. “Together with RIM, we can make it easy for the millions of BlackBerry users to have access to their favorite Yahoo! products and services while on the go. By combining Yahoo!’s services, which are some of the most used mobile products in the US, with the truly compelling BlackBerry platform, we are giving consumers a powerful and fun mobile Internet experience.”

“We are pleased to expand our relationship with Yahoo! to provide BlackBerry customers with new and enhanced access to Yahoo! services around the world,” added Jim Balsillie, Chairman and co-CEO at Research In Motion. “Our collaboration with Yahoo! will deliver increasingly rich content and services, including enhanced support for Yahoo! Mail, to BlackBerry customers in over sixty countries.”

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