Microsoft and Research In Motion, the company behind the BlackBerry line of devices, announced a patent licensing agreement on Tuesday that will allow RIM to use Microsoft’s Extended File Allocation Table (exFAT) digital file system for large-file multimedia such as videos and images in “certain BlackBerry devices,” presumably including the upcoming BlackBerry 10 mobile devices. Terms of the deal, such as how much RIM paid to use the patents, were not immediately disclosed.
But shares of RIM, which has seen its stock plummet as BlackBerry market share has eroded to Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android devices, gained a slight boost from the news.