BlackBerry presents PowerPoint for 'road warriors'

Research In Motion (RIM) has rolled out a BlackBerry Presenter that business "road warriors" can use to give PowerPoint presentations from the Canadian company's popular smartphones.

"If you do PowerPoint presentations, you can leave the laptop behind," RIM director of public relations Shelly Sofer said after pulling a Presenter from a jacket pocket.

"We see the use of this for the road warrior, and it can be left in a corporation board room so anyone can go in and do a presentation without having to pull out cables or mess with resolution."

A Presenter device, about the size of an Altoids mints container, is plugged into a projector and then controlled wirelessly by a BlackBerry.

Slides, graphs or other information assembled using Microsoft's PowerPoint program are routed to a projector and displayed in high resolution.

"The presentation streams securely over Bluetooth," Softer said. "You can walk around while doing your presentation, read notes on the handset and freeze or jump around the slides."

BlackBerry Presenter devices have enough memory to hold data from about 100 slides, so information can be left behind after the smartphone wielder departs.

(c) 2010 AFP