BlackBerry enables in-app purchases as well as balance between work and life!

Research In Motion introduced its BlackBerry Payment Service, enabling developers to monetize their software via in-application purchase options.

According to RIM, BlackBerry App World developers can offer in-app digital goods including content such as ebooks, magazines, and photos, as well as other services like video streaming or voice transcription.

However, RIM does not allow BlackBerry developers to sell virtual currencies or in-app credits, physical goods or services, and digital goods used across multiple applications.

In other news, RIM is giving BlackBerry users work-life Balance through their new feature, BlackBerry Balance.

Research In Motion will allow its handset owners to split work and personal data stored on the devices using this new feature.

The decision to separate work-related emails sent using the BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) from personal photographs, social networking activity and web browsing is BlackBerry’s bid to stay competitive in both the business and consumer markets.

Balance is expected to make its debut onto handsets in North America in the next two months, but there is no indication of a wider release yet.

It is expected to be available on all BlackBerry devices in the future, including the company’s as-yet unreleased PlayBook tablet.

The gang from Plastic Mobile Agency is heading from Toronto, Ontario over to  a warmer climate to the CTIA (Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association) 2009 conference in the fabulous Las Vegas. We covered it from a high-level in our post here but the true coverage will commence once we’re on the ground. We plan to bring you live updates to our blog here and be the first to report the many exciting findings.

Some early rumors of what maybe releasing include:

1. Skype for the iPhone
2. BlackBerry App World
3. BlackBerry TV
4. HTC Maple
5. More info on Palm Pre pricing

Be sure to be tuned to both our blog and Twitter for updates as some of these rumors become reality.

Here are the events that we will make sure to cover:

1. Day one Keynote Sessions – We look forward to hearing from both Al Gore and Mike Lazaridis
2. Exhibit Floors on all days to see all the exciting showcase of products and technologies
3. NXT Stage Mobile Entertainment Festival
4. Date 2 Keynotes
5. eWEEK – Healthcare IT and Wireless
6. WIP – Mobile Jam Session – More info on the Jam session found here
7. Mobility means Business
8. Day 3 Keynotes
9. NFC / Mobile Payments

Stay tuned right here for live updates.

According to BusinessWeek, it looks BlackBerry App World might be launching at the CTIA 09 next week on April 1st. Plastic will be at CTIA 09 in Vegas and it’s going to be very interesting to see what RIM will be bringing forth for both developers and consumers.  As a consumer, we hope to see apps that are rich with functionality and have a well-designed mobile user experiences – things that we’ve become used to thanks to the iPhone.

As a developer, we hope to see a better development arena (IDEs, debugging tools, frameworks, etc.). At Plastic, we develop mobile applications for many platforms (iPhone, Andriod, Windows Mobile, …) and by-far we put the most effort (man-power) on our BlackBerry projects. For instance, comparing development for the BlackBerry vs. iPhone… we see a multiple of 3-4 times the effort needed. I hope RIM is listening and catch up to Apple and other developer-friendlier platforms.