Blackberry copying the Windows Phone People Hub

Reuters reports Blackberry intends to increase their appeal by cribbing some consumer features from Windows Phone.

Their new Blackberry 10 OS will pull in contact details from social media and other Internet sites, such as blog posts, tweets, emails, into a single Blackberry page,

The feature should be familiar to Windows Phone 7 users from the Windows Phone People Hub, which of course debuted all the way back in 2010.

"BlackBerry has always had this heritage of productivity … We are just going to make it better yet again, when we launch BB10," said T.A. McCann, who is spearheading the development of the contacts and BlackBerry Messenger applications for the new platform.

Countering accusations of copying, McCann said many of the features have already been built into the contact management system on the latest version of the operating system that powers RIM’s PlayBook tablet device (above), and have originated from Seattle-based company Gist that was acquired by RIM in early 2011, and where McCann was CEO.

Given however that Blackberry 10 OS has already copied the Live Tiles I will continue to have my suspicions.

Blackberry is seeing its global market share rapidly shrinking, with doubts that the company will survive till the launch of Blackberry 10 in January next year. It is set to be overtaken by Windows Phone in US by November this year.