It seems that the time for video on smartphones might be quite a bit away yet with a report from Research in Motion (RIM, the company behind the BlackBerry) indicating that video traffic chokes mobile data networks.

BlackBerries themselves take fairly little bandwidth...

Still, RIM wasn’t too quick to point the finger at network providers, who already take an awful lot of flak for their smartphone-happy approaches, given the apparently unsustainable amount of data being moved around. Instead, RIM also placed a healthy portion of the blame on mobile developers’ failure to develop more efficient means of moving video content around. That said, at the end of the day it doesn’t matter who you choose to see as being at fault in the whole exchange, the fact is that mobile networks are choked by heavy traffic of video content.

According to Reuters RIM’s co-CEO, Mike Lazaridis, said of video capable smartphones,

“I still don’t know and I don’t think anyone knows if video is a killer app for smartphones … I don’t particularly think it is … If you think that today’s 3G as a browsing experience is a challenge to these data networks, imagine what a video streaming or download experience is going to be as these screens start to look like HD televisions in terms of resolutions.”

It’s an interesting point, and one that’s been made before, perhaps most pointedly by the FakeSteve blog, which saw a fake Steve Jobs coordinating iPhone users in an attempt to use mass loading of YouTube videos to collapse the AT&T network in an effort to show just how shaky the provider’s 3G network is.

Of course, the fact is that it seems that some proportion of people seem to want video content on their mobile devices, whether that’s what networks are designed to deliver or not. Just how it’ll all work out is something we’ll be curious to see.