Research in Motion has clearly seen some brighter days, but BlackBerry is pushing ahead with some new updates. Today, BlackBerry Messenger 6 was officially released and it comes with at least one novel feature that you might like. With BBM6, you can share news and updates from other apps as your BBM status.

Normally, your status is just a snippet of text. With the next BBM, you can connect your status to your most recent Foursquare check-in, for instance. This way, any of your BBM buddies can immediately know where you are without a) sending you a message to find out, or b) switching to the Foursquare app to look you up.

Foursquare isn’t the only app working with this kind of functionality, but aside from the Huffington Post and Poynt, not too many other major services have signed on. I’d imagine that Facebook and Twitter would be natural fits, too, but RIM will have to chat up those folks to see what kind of integration they’d want to have. You can see the full list of supported apps on the BB blog. The good thing is that if one of your BBM buddies shares a status with one of these apps and you don’t have it, you can download the necessary app directly from within the BBM 6 interface.

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It looks like a leak of BBM 6.0 has made its way onto the web and it comes with a few colorful new features that your current BlackBerry Messenger may not have. One of the most notable changes is the inclusion of color-coding your contacts.

You can already organize your contacts a variety of different ways, but the “at a glance” color coding could come in handy when you’re in a rush. The icons toward the bottom are the fun colored ones too, so I guess they want to have a little more personality this time around.

You can check out the screenshots for a better idea of what to expect, but the expectation is that BBM 6.0 will roll out as part of BB OS 6.1. Although you can grab the unauthorized version of the former now, it’s recommended that you don’t lest you want to deal with some unnecessary headaches.

Now the question remains, how will BBM look like RIM decides to port it over to other platforms? Will other smartphones get this color-coding too?

[Read]

The post Leaked: BlackBerry Messenger 6.0 Features Color-Coded Contacts appeared first on Mobile Magazine.