BlackBerry failed miserably in its attempt to bring BBM to Android and iOS last week, but the Canadian company hasn’t given up on making its popular messaging service available to all. In fact, it isn’t just targeting other mobile platforms, but it’s also planning to bring BBM to your desktop, too.

At the opening of this year’s NFL season, we looked at how the iPad has become a popular training tool among many NFL teams. With the season over and the Super Bowl just days away, many players, coaches, and fans are already looking ahead towards the NFL draft in the spring and next season.

Next season, Apple’s tablet will be an even bigger part io the NFL and it may even revolutionize parts of the organization and even the sport of football itself. Here’s how.

You’d think after recent events that RIM executives might have learned not to make public comments that fall somewhere between the categories of misleading and delusional. After all, as the New York Times recently reported, RIM’s new CEO could face litigation for misrepresenting the state of the company to its shareholders. Apparently even that lesson and the fact that half of CIOs and IT managers plan to migrate away from RIM’s BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) over the next year isn’t enough to prevent RIM from sticking its foot in its mouth.

The latest drama surrounds a report that developers are quickly losing interest and/or confidence in developing apps for the current BlackBerry OS or its BlackBerry 10 successor. Alec Saunders, RIM’s vice president of developer relations – who’s rarely tactful when giving his opinion – took to RIM’s developer blog on Friday to defend the company.

Despite all the talk about Android, Windows, and other tablets being iPad killers and expected to steal both consumer and business market share from Apple, not one has managed to make a real dent in the iPad’s dominance – particularly in the business space.

There are, of course, plenty of factors that I could point to and say “this is why the iPad is still number one” – IT folks know how to secure and manage iPads, there’s a single form factor, there’s a great selection of apps. I could go on, but one of the biggest reasons Apple that retains the market share that it does has nothing to do with specs, brand loyalty, app choices, or integration with existing enterprise systems.

As this absurd  and rather sleazy ad for a Toshiba Windows tablet makes obvious, virtually all Android, BlackBerry, and Windows device commercials don’t tell me anything about what a device can actually do for me.

According to a poll conducted by discount site CouponCodes4u, less than one-quarter of American consumers will consider buying Microsoft’s newly unveiled Surface. The discount site used the poll to study the overall tablet space and to determine brand awareness and perceptions across the U.S. market. It found that only 22% of respondents would consider buying one of the Surface tablets.

The survey, which was taken by 1,578 Americans in the 21 to 35 age bracket, also found high brand loyalty among tablet owners for both the iPad and for Android.

Google shook up the mobile business landscape by announcing its acquisition of mobile office powerhouse Quickoffice. That move might not seem terribly large, but it creates a very different and unexpected dynamic in the business mobility world. It also sets up a showdown over business capabilities that could have lasting ramifications.

Why is this move significant? It means that every company that produces a major mobile platform now also owns a serious office and productivity solution. Microsoft has Office, Apple has iWork, RIM has Documents To Go (which it acquired nearly two years ago), and Google now has Quickoffice as well as Google Docs. Each company can now ensure that its mobile business customers will have at least one solid option for working with Office files on their smartphones or tablets.

RIM has made a lot of headlines lately. Most of them have involved an ongoing exodus of executives leaving the company for greener pastures and/or reports of massive layoffs as the company tried to restructure itself under the leadership of new CEO Thorsten Heins.

There’s one bright spot of publicity for RIM this week, however. J. Crew CEO and Apple board member Millard Drexler uses a BlackBerry Bold 9900 – a fact noted after a CNBC piece about operations at J. Crew.

Is this good news for RIM? Yes and no. It shows that not every major company has abandoned the BlackBerry and not every executive has demanded an iPhone (at least not yet). Of course, if Drexler wasn’t a member of Apple’s board of directors, it’s likely that no one would really care what type of smartphone he used.

Late last week, RIM got FCC approval to ship LTE models of its BlackBerry PlayBook tablet. The news isn’t a complete surprise. RIM had announced plans for a 4G PlayBook option last year when the tablet originally shipped. Sprint was the targeted as the primary U.S. carrier for the device, which would’ve operated on Sprint’s WiMax network, but the carrier announced it was canceling that plan after the initial Wi-Fi PlayBook shipped (and got less than stellar reviews).

The iPad currently dominates the business tablet market so thoroughly that you can pretty much call it the entire market. A big point of debate in many business and IT circles is how long Apple will be able maintain such a position. One research firm reframed that debate by simplifying the question.

Which operating system do you think will become the preferred business tablet option over the next 12 months?

50% of respondents said that they expect the iPad to maintain its lead in business environments.

At BlackBerry World this week, RIM began giving prototype BlackBerry 10 phones to developers. The prototype, known as BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha is an effort by RIM to drive developer interest in its upcoming BlackBerry 10 mobile operating system with the hopes of building an app catalog for the platform before it launches the first BlackBerry 10 phones later this year.

While that’s a laudable and important idea, the handsets RIM delivered are lacking critical features like the ability to make calls or connect to wireless networks. RIM even pointed out that the actual user interface for BlackBerry 10 isn’t even running on the Dev Alpha devices because the company hasn’t finalized what that interface will look like.