BlackBerry network push to extend battery life

Server-side apps minimise mobile phone drain.

BlackBerry manufacturer Research In Motion (RIM) is expanding the range of on-network services accessible by developers to help battery life on its mobile devices remain competitive.

As smartphone models become more sophisticated, ensuring reasonable battery performance has proved tricky.

Apple has frequently been criticised for battery life problems caused by software updates, an issue which has also affected some Android models.

"We get a lot of kudos from people for providing battery life that is second to none," RIM vice president of product management Tom Goguen told iTnews during a recent visit to Australia.

"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."

Newly-developed corporate social networking and location services built into the BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) back-end system do most of their processing server-side to minimise battery drain, Goguen said.

"The social networking clients use an app server and that does the heavy lifting between connections and the device.

"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 whilst also maintaining the attributes like battery life."