RIM turns to TomTom for real-time traffic, mapping, and friendship

BlackBerry 10 has become something of a team effort for RIM — first the company revealed that Scalado would be adding camera features, and today a press release from TomTom details a cooperative effort with RIM to bring its real-time traffic data to BlackBerry Traffic. With the inclusion of this data, RIM is hoping to shave a little bit of time off of users’ commutes and, according to a study from the German Aerospace Center, that could mean as much as 50 minutes per week. In a move that will appeal to developers, TomTom has stated that its map and location data will be available through BlackBerry Maps and Locate Services, a system-wide API for querying map and location data. If RIM intends to catch up with the first and third-party navigation options available on iOS and Android, this certainly isn’t a bad start.