I was just taking a look at the memory specs on the 4 new BlackBerry devices that have come out recently.  The BlackBerry Bold, BlackBerry Pearl Flip, BlackBerry Storm, and BlackBerry Curve 8900 all have 128 MB of Flash Memory and 1GB of RAM.  Personally, I would have liked to have seen at least 256 MB of Flash but I can live with 128 MB.

1 GB of RAM, on the other hand,  is definitely kind of light compared to the iPhone which has 4 GB at worst.  RIM trys to counteract this  by shipping the BlackBerry Storm with an 8 GB microSD card, however, you can do little more than store pictures and media on the removable memory in a BlackBerry.  You can’t even store contacts outside of internal memory.

The processing power of the latest generation of BlackBerry devices is pretty good and should allow for some really cool and feature rich applications (games) to run on them.  Really cool and feature rich applications, however, tend to be larger in size and it doesn’t take very many of them to eat up all the free space on your BlackBerry.  This is why I think that RIM should allow BlackBerrys to run applications from microSD.

Now, I know that someone is going to say that to allow application execution from removable media introduces a possible gateway onto RIM’s secure network for hackers.  I believe, however, that that the same was said about bluetooth, tethering, digital cameras, MP3 playback, and the microSD slots from which applications cannot run.

I know that we usually think of Research in Motion has a hardware manufacturer but they are a software company as well.  A software company that specializes in making their hardware very secure.  The fact that RIM controls both the hardware and the software should make solving this security issue easier than it would be for companies that specialize in just one or the other.

In my opinion, one of two things is inevitable…  RIM will either start packing enormous amounts of internal memory into BlackBerry devices to meet the demands of all the cool applications of the future, or, figure out a way to allow application execution from removable memory securely.  Personally, I like option two because it always leaves room for growth as someone like my will always think that whatever memory comes installed is not enough.

Be a leader here RIM.  My guess is that within the next couple of iPhone releases, they will have removable memory and I would be willing to bet that they will allow application execution from them.  If you only follow suite after Apple does it first, you will look like you are reacting to them.  Albeit your method will probably be much more secure, but, to do at after the fact still makes it appear that you were reacting to Apple.

Do it first, however, and make it as safe and secure as you usually do and it may appear that Apple is reacting to you for a change.