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Facebook for BlackBerry racks up a million hits
Gadget lovers enjoy a good poke...

By Natasha Lomas

Published: Wednesday 02 April 2008

BlackBerry users have racked up more than one million downloads of a Facebook app in the five months since it launched.

Facebook for BlackBerry - which is free to download and launched on 24 October last year - allows users to perform a variety of tasks including sending and viewing messages, making Wall posts and 'poking' other Facebook users. A user's status message can also be updated on the go, and friend requests can be made and responded to. In addition, users can take photos on their phones and upload them directly to Facebook.

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Speaking at the world's biggest mobile phone trade show - Mobile World Congress - back in February, BlackBerry-maker RIM's co-CEO Jim Balsillie, said a B2B social networking revolution is on the way.

And commenting on the number of Facebook downloads, Mark Guibert, VP of corporate marketing at RIM, said in a statement: "When we launched Facebook for BlackBerry smart phones, we believed that consumers would recognise the value of marrying social networking with mobility and that vision has now been validated more than a million times."

The availability of 'sophisticated' free mobile apps offering features such as social networking, videoing and messaging is helping to drive app development and user activity in the mobile space, according to mobile apps aggregator GetJar which notes that 200 million apps have been downloaded from its website in the past two years.

GetJar also said it is seeing significant developer and user interest in personal productivity apps such as calendars and synchronisation tools, especially for BlackBerry and Windows Mobile platforms.

It expects GPS tech - increasingly finding its way into phones - to give a further boost to the mobile apps market.