BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) finally headed to Windows Phone; will debut this summer

Dis­pelling recent reports in the tech blo­gos­phere to the con­trary, Black­Ber­ry announced this morn­ing that it is work­ing to bring BBM, Black­Ber­ry’s pop­u­lar and increas­ing­ly cross-plat­form mobile-to-mobile mes­sag­ing ser­vice, to Win­dows Phone, in part­ner­ship with Nokia. BBM will also be present on Noki­a’s new Android-based Nokia X smart­phone plat­form when it launch­es in a few months.

“BBM con­tin­ues to grow in pop­u­lar­i­ty as mil­lions of peo­ple use our mobile plat­form for chat­ting and con­nect­ing with friends or col­leagues, and we are very excit­ed that we will soon wel­come Win­dows Phone and Nokia X users to the BBM com­mu­ni­ty,” said John Sims, Pres­i­dent, Glob­al Enter­prise Solu­tions at Black­Ber­ry in a state­ment.

“Today marks an excit­ing moment for Nokia,” agreed Bryan Bini­ak, Vice Pres­i­dent and GM of Devel­op­er Rela­tions, Nokia Cor­po­ra­tion. “By bring­ing BBM to the Win­dows Phone and Nokia X com­mu­ni­ties, our cus­tomers will be able to expe­ri­ence this pop­u­lar glob­al mes­sag­ing app.”

BBM, which is short for BlackBerry Messen­ger, was first intro­duced by Research in Motion (now Black­Ber­ry Lim­it­ed) sev­er­al years ago as a secure and pri­vate mobile-to-mobile mes­sag­ing ser­vice for Black­Ber­ry users, build­ing on the ear­li­er PIN mes­sag­ing capa­bil­i­ty includ­ed in the com­pa­ny’s handsets.

(A PIN is an eight-char­ac­ter per­son­al iden­ti­fi­ca­tion num­ber con­sist­ing of let­ters as well as num­bers. Each Black­Ber­ry hand­set is assigned its own unique PIN at the time of man­u­fac­ture, in addi­tion to indus­try-stan­dard identifiers).

BBM has always uti­lized the PIN sys­tem. In the Black­Ber­ry uni­verse, PINs are the equiv­a­lent of screen names. They’re akin to pub­lic keys. If you know the PIN of the per­son you want to chat with, you can send an invi­ta­tion (or friend request, in Face­book par­lance) to him or her. If he or she accepts the invi­ta­tion, you’re then con­nect­ed, and it becomes pos­si­ble to ini­ti­ate and car­ry on a conversation.

In its ear­ly days, BBM could only be used for two-way text con­ver­sa­tions. But Black­Ber­ry has since added a lot of new capa­bil­i­ties to BBM, includ­ing groups, chan­nels, attach­ments, inte­gra­tion with oth­er appli­ca­tions, voice call­ing, video chat + screen shar­ing, and as of last week, stick­ers through the new BBM Store.

BBM is supe­ri­or to text mes­sag­ing in many ways. It works over Wi-Fi, it’s total­ly inde­pen­dent of mobile tele­phone num­bers, and there is no one hun­dred and six­ty char­ac­ter lim­it. Most impor­tant­ly, mes­sages are con­firmed as deliv­ered (D) when they land on the recip­i­en­t’s device, and con­firmed as read (R) when opened by the user. The D’s and the R’s alone make BBM extreme­ly useful.

Last May, at the final Black­Ber­ry Live con­fer­ence, the com­pa­ny announced it was tak­ing BBM cross-plat­form, and would make the ser­vice avail­able to iOS and Android users in the fall. High antic­i­pa­tion and a leaked ver­sion of the app messed up the ini­tial launch plans, but Black­Ber­ry ulti­mate­ly got the roll­out back on track and BBM saw a huge num­ber of down­loads in its first few days.

On non-Black­Ber­ry phones, new BBM users are assigned a PIN when they launch the app, since they don’t have a Black­Ber­ry hand­set with a pre­as­signed PIN.

Black­Ber­ry has con­tin­u­al­ly sought to improve the BBM expe­ri­ence on iOS and Android plat­forms since the launch last fall. BBM 2.0 for those plat­forms debuted ear­li­er this month, improv­ing the fea­ture par­i­ty with BBM for Black­Ber­ry hand­sets by intro­duc­ing BBM Voice and BBM Channels.

In addi­tion, Black­Ber­ry recent­ly fig­ured out how to make BBM avail­able to peo­ple still stuck on Gin­ger­bread (the Google code name for an old­er incar­na­tion of Android). Now Black­Ber­ry is con­quer­ing the next fron­tier by bring­ing BBM to Win­dows Phone. It’s a very smart move and it will give true mean­ing to the slo­gan #BBM4All, which the com­pa­ny uses on Twitter.

It would be nice to see BBM debut on the desk­top lat­er this year as well. Cur­rent­ly, BBM only works on hand­sets and on Black­Ber­ry’s Play­Book tablet (when the Play­Book is bridged to a Black­Ber­ry smartphone).

Since Win­dows Phone is get­ting BBM, maybe Win­dows (and hope­ful­ly Mac and GNU/Linux dis­tri­b­u­tions) won’t be too far behind.