BlackBerry patent would convert e-mailed appointment references to calendar entries

Now, in the pantheon of BlackBerry inventions, this is cooler than many.

Just this morning, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office published "Scheduling Events from Electronic Messages," a patent application from BlackBerry-maker Research In Motion that would enable extraction of appointment-related information from BlackBerry emails and then insert information about the appointment in a user's BlackBerry calendar.

In other words, if I send you an email saying, "let's meet with Jim Hogan at 1 p.m. on April 3, then you- the recipient- would have the option of exporting that text to your BlackBerry calendar for insertion at that time and date.

The Patent Abstract is a bit less clear, but since it articulates RIM's view of this invention's personality, let's go there.

Abstract says:

Scheduling an event on an electronic communications device configured for sending and receiving electronic messages over a communications network, including extracting information from an electronic message at the communications device; displaying on a display of the communications device an event scheduling interface for scheduling an event, the event scheduling interface having a plurality of input fields for receiving information about the event; and automatically populating at least one of the input fields in dependence on the extracted information.

Follow the link under the patent name for more deets.