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Building a wireless? Buy a Blackberry radio!

It may seem like taking coals to Newcastle; but American pioneer RIM has decided to sell its GPRS radios to the rest of the world.

It isn't actually that long since Research In Motion (RIM) updated its popular Blackberry hand-held super-pager, from American Mobitex packet data standards, to use GSM standards for GPRS data - and now, the company is preparing to offer its radio modems to an astonished world as components for others to use.

In Orlando, at the CTIA exhibition, RIM announced a new family of OEM radio modems for GSM/GPRS wireless networks worldwide.

The new embedded radio modems incorporate the same core radio frequency technology built into the BlackBerry 5800 Series and RIM was able to demonstrate beta versions of the component circuits at the show.

"The GSM/GPRS family of RIM radio modems incorporates six generations of hardware design knowledge and fourteen years of packet data software experience," said Mike Lazaridis, President and Co-CEO at RIM.

RIM's radio modems are designed to allow OEM manufacturers to wirelessly enable a variety of products including laptops, handheld devices, point-of-sale terminals, bank machines, billboards, monitoring and metering equipment, vending machines, GPS systems and vehicles.