RIM says Blackberry apps are on the way

Research in Motion is the white elephant in the Mobile World Congress room this week, but it’s there to assure that its time is far from over.

If you’ve heard Research in Motion talk about the state of Blackberry apps over the last several months, you’d hear them brag about the tens of thousands of apps in the App World marketplace. That sounds impressive enough until you compare it against the hundreds of thousands of apps in the Android Market or iTunes App Store.

Now, the Blackberry maker’s tone is changing and says that although the selection isn’t vast right now, the onslaught is coming.

RIM head of developer relations Alec Saunders was quote by PCMag as saying there is a “significant effort underway” to bring a whole bunch of new app makers to the Blackberry platform.

“For some apps, it’s a question of timing. They’ll release on their timetable,” he added.

Since the release of the new version of RIM’s Playbook operating system, the company said it has seen a large increase in the number of tablets being activated.

Of course, it wouldn’t take much to amount to a “large increase,” since the Playbook has pretty much been a flop from day one. RIM also suffered another blow earlier this month when Netflix said it had no plans to release a streaming app for the Blackberry operating system.

Nevertheless, RIM is at Mobile World Congress trying to impress. It’s doing the best it can.