New BlackBerry software will make your phone cooler
EA demos a 3D car-racing game on the BlackBerry Storm.
(Credit: Photo by Jessica Dolcourt/CNET)"OpenGL ES" and "Eclipse" may not mean much to you if you're not an application developer, but ordinary BlackBerry owners will soon be able to benefit from the string of announcements uncovered on Monday at RIM's second, annual BlackBerry Developer Conference.
BlackBerry-maker RIM announced on Monday enhancements to its BlackBerry application development platform--including four APIs for developers to more easily integrate ads, payment services, geolocation, and push notifications for third-party developers.
What does that mean for you? The new tools and features for developers should make it easier for them to create richer apps and do so faster. For instance, new support for OpenGL ES, a graphics API, makes it possible for developers to create 3D games for BlackBerry. Electronic Arts (EA) hopped on stage to demo the car-racing game Need for Speed-Shift on the Storm. The game includes new touch controls, like swiping to activate a speed boost or touching the screen to apply the brakes.
Very soon you'll start seeing visual themes and widgets available for purchase and download in BlackBerry's App World. RIM's new BlackBerry Theme Studio 5.0 will let developers include ringtones in themes. As a result, a theme you download through App World might replace your default ringtone with one that matches the visual theme, like the "Batman" theme song to mirror your "Batman" wallpaper. The ringtones sound very cool, but are limited to BlackBerry phones running the 5.0 operating system or higher.
As Apple has done, RIM will soon be adding the capability to make in-app purchases on a BlackBerry.
(Credit: Photo by Jessica Dolcourt/CNET)In addition to finding themes and widgets in the App World for the first time, you'll soon be able to buy premium content not only through PayPal, the current purchasing model, but in 2010, through your monthly phone bill. Like Apple, RIM will be making subscriptions and micropayments available to developers. That will make it possible for users to unlock premium features in BlackBerry apps, like navigation apps, music apps, and games. iPhone games commonly make use of in-app purchasing.
BlackBerry owners can also look forward to seeing push notification not just for core BlackBerry apps, but also for apps created by third-party developers. In the near future, in addition to seeing a red circle or badge as an alert, applications can also insert a notification message into your in-box. Similarly, an app can schedule an event on your BlackBerry calendar, and will be able to call up the camera, as with iPhone, to snap a photo from within the app. We should see a rash of social-networking apps taking advantage of this feature.
Blurriness aside, apps like the forthcoming Dash can use RIM's new location features.
(Credit: Photo by Jessica Dolcourt/CNET)Most new BlackBerry smartphones contain GPS; when GPS isn't available, RIM is enabling location services that pinpoint your whereabouts using information from nearby cell phone towers.
RIM has also announced a new alliance with Adobe, which--in 2010--will let developers create applications with Flash 10, and with familiar Adobe Web development tools like Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and Flex. New menu options within Adobe's CS4 applications will help developers create sophisticated graphics and animations, then test them on an emulator or on a smartphone.
The remaining question is, will the software improvements make potential iPhone users take notice? While the technology may differ between the iPhone and BlackBerry behind the scenes, one the surface, many of the new additions appear to be playing catch-up with capabilities already available in the iPhone--like micropayments, notifications for all third-party apps (before, this was limited to publishers who were part of the BlackBerry Alliance program, and for a price), and 3D graphics support. Regardless, whenever developers get a hand creating a greater variety of better-looking apps, users gain.
Updated at 5:15 pm PT to clarify the role of push notification in third-party applications and to correct the new additions to BlackBerry's developer services that Apple has already had.
Jessica Dolcourt reviews the latest and greatest smartphone apps, in addition to a healthy dose of Windows software. E-mail Jessica and follow her on Twitter. 
i mean official releases.
iPhone = WebKit
Android = WebKit
WebOS = WebKit
Symbian = WebKit
Blackberry = WebKit (via Torch Mobile acquisition)
WinMo = WebKit (with a 3rd-party browser)
WebKit support is attractive, because WebKit:
1. delivers a great browsing experience.
2. is a highly standards-compliant rendering engine.
3. brings advanced HTML5, SVG, WebGL?, etc. web technologies to mobile platforms.
4. will allow developers to focus on building great web apps, instead of wasting resources re-implementing their apps for each platform.
5. potentially brings 1000s of web apps to ALL smartphone platforms (iPhone currently has >4000 web apps: http://www.apple.com/webapps/).
Hopefully, the days of waiting for a great app on one platform to reach another platform are numbered.
If you're referring to cell phone tower triangulation or RSSI-based geolocation, then the term "pinpoint" only applies on the scale of a world map (and not a very big print). Typical errors are measured in km.
If, instead, the information gathered from nearby cell towers is "Assisted GPS," then the cell tower's contribution is solely in speeding the time to first fix for the phone's GPS receiver but, otherwise, has no effect on accuracy. Non-assisted GPS initialization can take over a minute. The GPS chip can draw enough power that in a smartphone its smarter to leave it powered off to conserve the phone's battery life until you need geolocation.
If its some other technology, entirely, I'd be very interested to hear what it is.
This kind of comment always drives me crazy. What about all the stuff that the Blackberry already does exceptionally well that the iPhone does not do? I have owned both the iPhone 3g and a Blackberry for some time now. Consider just a couple of things about the iPhone...
No ability to send or accept calendar invitations
No ability to grab contact info and automatically add it to my contacts list
No multitasking - therefore no ability to have the most simple and functional program any business smartphone can have - a Today Screen with all of your appointment, emails, tasks, calendars, and much more right at your fingertips. This is a big deal, and I would go back to the Blackberry for this alone.
Just a couple of other gripes...
The speakerphone on the iPhone is just a joke - you simply can't hear it unless you are in a totally quiet room. On YouTube there are actually videos with instructions on how to take a needle and poke holes in the speaker cover so you can hear the lousy thing!
And the battery is truly crap!
100,000 apps? This is just a marketing ploy. About 99,000 of them are stupid, worthless, or simply don't work. Ever read the reviews? And several of the ones that are worth having are almost essential because the iPhone doesn't include a lot of basic stuff that should already be included.
If all of this isn't really the case, (and believe me, there's plenty more stuff I could mention) then why is there a rather large community of people willing to void their warranties just to jailbreak their iPhone? They just want all the stuff that the Blackberry and several other phones already do without jailbreaking.
The browser and the multimedia tools are literally the only things I have found that are better on the iPhone. However, when it comes to handling business matters, these are certainly not essentials.
The iPhone is a great toy and cool for some things, mostly playtime and surfing the web. And you can buy apps all day long. As a business tool, however, it seriously lags behind several other choices out there.
"30 Things the iphone can't do but Windows Mobile Can"
http://www.knowliz.com/2009/08/27-basic-things-iphone-cant-do-but.html
file:///C:/Users/Ronald%20G%20Porter/Desktop/30%20Basic%20Things%20iPhone%20can't%20do.webarchive
file:///C:/Users/Ronald%20G%20Porter/Desktop/Things%20My%20iPhone%20Can't%20Do.webarchive
file:///C:/Users/Ronald%20G%20Porter/Desktop/'Droid%20Does'.webarchive
- by rgp_pcw November 13, 2009 3:19 PM PST
- Sorry...I screwed up the links. Try this... Yeah, I know I just lost some street cred :>0. Read the links anyway.
- Like this Reply to this comment
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(8 Comments)http://www.insideview.ie/irisheyes/2009/04/things-my-iphone-cant-do.html
http://www.engadget.com/2009/10/17/verizons-anti-iphone-gets-its-first-commercial-droid-does/
http://www.techmoments.com/2009/08/23/10-things-the-iphone-needs-fixed-now/