The exclusivity of BBM was one of the big selling points for blackberries. That and their integration with corporate IT infrastructures. For a while that worked

The exclusivity of BBM was one of the big selling points for blackberries. That and their integration with corporate IT infrastructures. For a while that worked really well, and BBM was the reason to buy a blackberry after the keyboards and the security features. I recall at the time there was huge demand from executives to have IT support their iphones. Once the path had been found for that to happen, others followed. The other major thing that reduced the advantage that BBM gave RIM was that SMS costs reduced drastically in price, with many even lower-end contracts moving to unlimited SMS as mobile data and MMS became the new means of extorting customers. As such, the cost of BBM being exclusive to blackberry was no longer offset by the benefits it gave. It's worth noting that one of the other things that the blackberry gave us was probably the first example of widespread mobile zero rating. I recall if you bought a blackberry on some contracts, your BBM data usage was unmetered. Both of the features in the patent claim are obvious or there is prior art. Density maps have been used for a long time. Weather maps are a great example of this where they are often used to show rain probability or cloud density. It just seems we have just moved from x on a computer patents to x on a mobile device patents.