For starters, BlackBerries now account for 5.3 percent of the handheld market, growing an impressive 289 percent last quarter alone. But that's not all: a growing number of mobile device companies, platform providers and wireless carriers, including Motorola, PalmSource, Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Siemens AG, T-Mobile, 02 and Samsung, have signed on to offer RIM's "push" based e-mail on their own hardware.

Plus, BlackBerry-like QWERTY thumb-keyboards are sprouting up in the hardware lines of such vendors as palmOne, with its Treo communicators, Hewlett-Packard, with its iPAQ h4355, and Sony Ericsson with its recently announced P910 smartphone. The revolutionary importance of BlackBerry keyboard can't be overstated. It single-handedly solved the text-entry problem for mobile devices, and is one of the chief reasons for RIM's accelerating success.

But increasingly, technology licensing is becoming a key to that success. To make its solutions more readily available to device manufacturers, RIM today introduced a new program called BlackBerry Built-In. With the program, vendors can more easily incorporate BlackBerry applications and services, including e-mail, calendaring and browsing, into their smartphones, mail phones and PDAs.

As a result, End users get BlackBerry connectivity and services from the mobile device of their choice, while enterprises, developers, and wireless carriers can support multiple handhelds and mobile handsets with the same BlackBerry-based applications and services.

RIM's Chairman Jim Balsillie said in prepared statement, "the BlackBerry Built-In licensing program is another important step that supports RIM's strategy to provide an open, extensible and scalable wireless platform."

Siemens, the first company to sign up for BlackBerry Built-In, plans to release a high-end mail phone, the SK65, with BlackBerry e-mail and personal information management capabilities in the Fall (see Siemens Builds BlackBerry into SK65 Mail Phone).