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Research in Motion (RIM) announced at the Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association (CTIA) 2005 trade show in San Francisco this week it would turn to Intel microprocessors for its next generation of BlackBerry handhelds.

The processors in question are Intel's new XScale PXA9xx chips, codenamed "Hermon", introduced at the chip giant’s Spring Developer Forum in March 2005. These mobile CPUs support Enhanced Data Rates for Global Evolution (EDGE) high-speed networks, an extension of GPRS—the data transfer side of GSM.

EDGE broadband delivers exchange rates between 100 kbps and 130 kbps, resulting in faster Web access and downloads.

There are three million BlackBerry users. The devices used by these people currently run on a variety of mobile processors. RIM co-chief executive Mike Lazaridis says, "We try to use best-in-class processors for all those technologies. Intel offers us the best platform moving forward."

"We chose the Intel PXA9xx cellular processor because it provides us with the increased processing horsepower we need for future wireless applications, without compromising battery life requirements. The combination of Intel's XScale technology with RIM's wireless firmware and BlackBerry applications is groundbreaking," Lazaridis added.

Intel's XScale processors are already used in the majority of Palm and Windows Mobile platform handhelds and smartphones. "As we've gone beyond e-mail, we (RIM) realized that we need the extra horsepower so we can grow beyond that," according to Lazaridis.

The first Intel-powered BlackBerry handhelds are due to ship by the end of the year.

RIM's Place
The leading PDA vendor, according to recent Gartner statistics, is RIM with a 23 percent market share in the second quarter. RIM's performance was an almost 65 percent improvement over its results from the same period a year ago.

As an operating system, RIM shipped 65 percent more units than it did last year, which was enough to give it a 23 percent share. Gartner does not consider RIM a smartphone and did not include Palm's Treo devices in its stats because they are smartphones.

Another analyst firm, Canalys, examines the PDA and smartphone market in total; under a single category it labels smart devices. Unlike Gartner, Canalys doesn’t consider RIM BlackBerry a PDA, as it lumps anything with cellular capabilities under the smartphone category. ( Competitor IDC uses this same methodology.)

According to Canalys, the Symbian platform continued to dominate with 61.4 percent of the smart device market. By comparison, Microsoft's Windows Mobile platform dropped to 18.3 percent from 23.1 percent. The Palm OS fell even further, moving from 22 percent to 10.5 percent of the smart device market.

Even though RIM—platform and device go hand in hand—landed in fourth place on Canalys's list at 7 percent, the number of BlackBerry handhelds sold actually doubled.

Symbian mainstay Nokia accounted for 50 percent of all smart device shipments during the first quarter of 2005. Palm (then palmOne), a distant second behind Nokia, tallied 9.4 percent of worldwide smart device shipments; followed by RIM with its aforementioned 7 percent, Fujitsu with 6.1 percent, and Hewlett-Packard with 5.6 percent.