ORLANDO—Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced a major partnership between Microsoft and RIM to integrate the Bing search engine deeply into the BlackBerry OS on stage at the BlackBerry World conference today.
"We're going to invest uniquely in the BlackBerry platform in addition to our own Windows Phone platform," Ballmer said.
Ballmer spent a few minutes calling the Android ecosystem "chaos" and the Apple iOS platform "limited" before throwing in a good word for Windows Phone 7 and celebrating the BlackBerry as the "early leader in Internet-connected mobile devices."
Bing on BlackBerry will start out as default search and mapping apps "with regular, featured placement promotion in the BlackBerry App World carousel," as well as the default search engine in the browser. But in demos using a BlackBerry Torch, Microsoft showed that Bing is going farther as well.
"Bing will be deeply integrated at the BlackBerry OS level," Ballmer said.
In demos, Microsoft showed a Bing search bar and alert bar at the bottom of a Torch's lock screen. The alert bar shows location-related content: in this case, an internal map of the hotel that BlackBerry World is being held in.
Microsoft also showed a local restaurant search with integrated OpenTable booking, and the ability to find local deals and coupons.
It's unclear which BlackBerries the new Bing software will be available on, though the demo's use of a Torch makes us hopeful that it won't be exclusive to the new BlackBerry 9900 running BlackBerry 7.
The new Bing search and maps apps for BlackBerry are coming today, with the integrated OS experience coming for the holidays, Ballmer said.
"There's no doubt that value can really get created when companies can work together and partner deeply to deliver the best of what each of them does specially," he said.