RIM sheds light on BlackBerry app stores
Published: 22 Oct 2008 09:15 BST
Mike Lazaridis, RIM's co-founder and co-chief executive, has told the 700 registered developers at the first-ever BlackBerry Developer Conference that the key to successful BlackBerry development isn't just good programming but physics as well.
At the conference in Santa Clara, California, Lazaridis pointed to an image of a box with 'bandwidth', 'capacity', 'performance' and 'battery life' written in each corner. These are the four principles of BlackBerry's "physics", he said. If developers push too hard to achieve high broadband speeds, for instance, capacity drops. On individual devices, there is a trade-off between battery life and performance.
"This is one box that it's wise not to think outside," Lazaridis joked.
Lazaridis's insights are one reason that scores of developers have gathered at the Silicon Valley conference. Another is meeting with technical experts for hands-on advice for readying their applications for the BlackBerry Bold and touchscreen BlackBerry Storm — expected to reach US stores within the next few weeks — and for the BlackBerry application store, anticipated to debut in March 2009.
The on-device BlackBerry Application Center and online BlackBerry Application StoreFront will make it easier for the 20 million BlackBerry users on all platforms to find and download add-on applications for their specific phone models.
Applications for AOL, Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, Gmail and Windows Live Hotmail are among others soon to be available; developers can also submit their code for inclusion in the store as early as December.
Application authors will get to keep 80 percent of the proceeds, RIM said in a statement, while the other 20 percent will go to RIM — and, presumably, to the carriers, when users download applications from the carrier-controlled store on their phone.
RIM also announced an in-progress partnership with PayPal that makes the online bill-payment company likely as the prevailing payment system for purchases made on the Blackberry Application StoreFront.
BlackBerry's browser forms another part of the application story. The version 4.6 browser packaged in the BlackBerry Bold, for instance, will operate much more like a desktop browser, with greater support for CSS, Ajax, HTML, XHTML, and DOM L2 code.
This is a move that RIM hopes will attract even more application developers to populate the online and on-device stores, particularly those more experienced in programming to web standards.
Credit: More BlackBerry app store details emerge from CNET News
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