RIM acquires The Astonishing Tribe to improve BlackBerry UI

Research In Motion (NASDAQ:RIMM) has acquired Swedish mobile user interface design firm The Astonishing Tribe in an effort to bolster the user experience across its BlackBerry smartphone platform and new PlayBook tablet. Financial terms were not disclosed. RIM announced the TAT deal on its Inside BlackBerry blog, with CTO David Yach touting the firm's lengthy history with mobile and embedded technology: "TAT focuses on delivering great user experiences, from a design, technology and usability perspective," Yach writes. "Their design technology is used today in a variety of industries including the consumer electronics and automotive sectors."

TAT's UI technology spans more than 300 million mobile devices worldwide--its Cascades and Motion Lab solutions, built on the company's Kastor platform, tout enhanced multimedia and graphics as well as time-to-market savings, resource efficiency and platform independence. Last month, TAT introduced three new live wallpapers optimized for Android smartphones.

Research In Motion unveiled the PlayBook in September, concurrently launching the new BlackBerry Tablet OS, which the device maker said eventually will replace its current BlackBerry smartphone operating system across all of its devices. The BlackBerry Tablet OS is built upon the QNX Neutrino microkernel architecture and boasts full POSIX compliance, offering developers easy portability of C-based code alongside support for Open GL for 2D and 3D graphics-intensive applications (e.g., gaming). RIM notes the Tablet OS also supports Java, enabling developers to translate existing BlackBerry 6 apps to the PlayBook format, and runs apps built in Adobe Mobile AIR.

For more:
- read this Inside BlackBerry blog entry

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