People have often rightfully pointed out that we here at OSNews do not seem to pay a lot of attention to RIM and its BlackBerry mobile operating system. Those people are right, but it stems from the fact that I simply have never actually seen, let alone used, a BlackBerry, which makes it very hard to write about. I’m hoping this will go a little way into turning that frown upside down: today, RIM demonstrated version 6.0 of its BlackBerry operating system. And it’s on OSNews’ front page.
Mike Lazaridis, Research In Motion’s co-CEO, showed off BlackBerry version 6.0 today during a keynote at the WES 2010 conference (could somebody please tell me what WES stands for?). Its focus will be on a touch-friendly interface, better web browsing experience, rewritten native applications, and a new homescreen/UI experience. “Fresh, but familiar; easy to use, but incredibly powerful; fun, but approachable” were the catchphrases.
Of course, in this day and age, your mobile user interface has to be touch-friendly. BlackBerry OS version 6.0 introduces several aspects common on competing platforms, such as rubberbanding and kinetic scrolling. It will also support multitouch and new gestures. Non-touchscreen devices will not be neglected though.
The home screen has also been revamped. “At first quick glance during the video BlackBerry 6 looks familiar, but then all of the new and improved features start to jump out at you,” writes Kevin Michaluk from CrackBerry.com, “Search from Homescreen, a pull down for notifications (sweet!), pop-up contextual menus, etc.”
Several of the default applications have been re-written by RIM, with the browser being the most notable improvement. It’s based on WebKit now (what else?), which should certainly deliver an improved web browsing experience to BlackBerry users.
“It’s really great,” said Jim Balsillie, RIM’s other co-CEO, “Its ACID test score is 100, speed is great, efficiency is great. It has HTML5 support, JavaScript, multitab browsing, and you’ve got a widget platform so you can download Web apps and run them online or offline.” It will support Flash, too, in the future.
Perhaps the best news is that this new version of the operating system will be delivered to existing BlackBerry phones as well, but which ones exactly the company didn’t reveal. There’s also no word yet on a release date.
Just think of it this way: Blackberries are about as prevalent here (i.e. in the U.S.) as Nokia smartphones are in Europe (or that is my understanding). In other words, I have never seen a Nokia smartphone, but I see Blackberries on a fairly regular basis.
That is true. Last year I walked into a T-Mobile shop in Minneapolis, got a prepaid sim card and put it into my old Nokia E65. The guy who sold me the card said he’d never seen an E-Series phone in the wild… and offered me $500 for it. I kindly refused.
Why did you refuse? You can get unlocked E65’s for close to $300 these days from the nokia website. Could have made a quick profit.
I commute into London every day by train and I see an awful lot of blackberries. Or is that a lot of awful blackberries…..
I don’t see so many Nokia smartphones. Except mine of course (N97 mini).
There are a lot of blackberries in Europe, but they are mainly used by business people in suits. Not so much by the consumers.
Here in France 90% of the phones are so called “feature phones”. Some people call them “dumb” phones. Most people want them over so called “smart” phones. I believe it is not only about the price.
I have one and it is not because it is cheap but because so called “smart” phones suck. I have one week and a half of battery life. If I’m in a hurry, I can charge my phone for 5 minutes and it is enough for all the day. My so called “dumb phone” is 7 year old and has a better camera quality than the iPhone, have a removable barrery, can send MMS, have a slot for memory card. I can surf the web with Opera Mini. It’s much smaller than the iPhone and it doesn’t feel falling from several meters. I does have bluetooth and that bluetooth works with my friends that have different brands of phones. I can plug it to the computer and it is a storage device. I can tether and use it with my netbook. I can install apps from whatever vendor.
So ask yourself: what does your phone do for you? Did you buy a phone for pinching, kinetic scrolling and page flipping? Is it to brag? Is it pretty? Do the girls love your phone?
I know several people who bought smart phones and regret it, some of them sold it. So called smart phones suck. So called dumb phones are superior AND cheaper.
not impressed (i really dislike the BB OS). I hope their acquisition of QNX means that 7.0 will be a release i get excited about. 6.0 is a nice improvement, but the under the hood stuff needs some radical changes (this may not be as bad in 6.0, i haven’t tested it, so this is just opinion at this point).
Did they even mention the WebKit browser? They’ve been promising that for what feels like years.
It’s annoying that no devices or UI shots were revealed (aside from those in the video). I would have loved to see an actual UI rather than a canned video. *sigh*
Did you even read the article?
Blackberryos.com or perhaps bbleaks.com managed to datamine a release time of June or July and a likely requirement of 256MB application memory. I’m at school now, but I can probably dig up a link later tonight.
But I’m quite excited. Webkit browser.
Also, I’ve never seen an Android phone. I’ve seen them in stores with a home screen sticker on the screen, but never seen one alive and usable. I see about 40% Blackberries, 30% iPhones, 30% dumbphones.
Huge, well known companies like Facebook will have apps for everything… iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, Meego, etc.
What about well known, but maybe not as huge companies. Will they develop for iPhone, then if they have time and money, develop for Android, then if they have time and money develop for Blackberry?
I would imagine you’d want to target first either iPhone or Android because of marketshare (or just Android if you don’t hate yourself)
Also depends on the app itself. Blackberries are pretty entrenched in large companies. So if its an enterprise style app, blackberry would be more of a priority than anything else.
The iPhone doesn’t have high market share! You read too much adverts and watch TV too much if you think so.
If you want to develop for the highest number, do J2ME.
(market share wise:)
J2ME (95%) > QT (25%) > Symbian (24%) > blackberry (10%) > WinMo (5%) > iphone (2%) > Android (2%) > Maemo (0%) > others (0%)
The iPhone is a niche product that is so overly hyped by the media people think it has the highest market share.
Edited 2010-04-28 13:07 UTC
Blackberry OS is incredibly outdated. Applications for it are developed using the totally brokem J2ME API and no native support. Nowadays most phones support sandboxed native or JNI with more proper interfaces.
Seriously, it just takes a look to the BlackBerry App Store to see how sluggish and broken every application in there is, as proof of how outdated Blackberry OS is.
Given the great harware and loads of RAM the devices have, you’d expect much, much better..
Pretty silly comment. You can develop using the pure j2me api if you want your app to run on both bb and other manufacturer feature phones (see http://getjar.com), but there is an extremely rich rim api that 99.9% of exclusively blackberry apps are written to.
I have no idea what you mean by j2me is broken. That’s absurd. If you mean not enough eye candy, that was the entire point of the design of j2me (“pure” java slimmed down so it could run anywhere). There is the Sun/Oracle LWUIT toolkit that runs on top of j2me that gives “swing” style UI hooks for both blackberry, j2me and Android with animations, advanced layout managers, etc.
If you want a good example of what can be done just relying on j2me see the snaptu app http://www.snaptu.com/
Most people complain about blackberry development because it is too “hard” compared to iPhone that provides cookie cutter controls/UI that make the majority of iphone apps look the same just as Apple intended.
Blackberry could do the same if they chose, but no UI on any platform is ever going to convert the apple fanboi legions. Not even SenseUI/TouchFlo on Android or the newest Win7Mo UI which are very advanced and full of fluff make a dent.
BB will have to make a choice if they want to go after the consumer/media market or circle the wagons around the “power” user and the low-end segments. The Storm/Storm2 were abject failures in that respect.
Edited 2010-04-28 01:15 UTC
Sorry, maybe i should have meant to say that Java is broken.
Java phone developers are all the same, they are “You can do this in java, why would you need C or C++?”.
Which is true for simple applications. If you want to do a slight bit of image, audio, video, network, processing, or do 3D rendering, making a synthesizer, games with relatively complex behavior, complex interfaces that are beyond moving sprites around, or anything relatively complex, Java is prohibitive.
Java on phones is pretty much like having to program for a 6502 or a Z80 when you have a powerful ARM cpu.
It’s not even portable because java VMs, J2ME implementations, etc are all slightly incompatible.
Pretty much the only reason outdated phone OSs like Blackbery OS use ONLY Java is because they can’t provide a security model, protection or sandboxing, like Android or Apple’s iPhone do.
I mean, I shouldn’t even be arguing this, simply compare the level of complexity that applications and games can reach on the iPhone (using ObjC or C++), or Android (using native SDK/JNI) to the pitiful state of the most advanced Blackberry/J2ME applications. It’s like a completely different world.
Funny that you mention Android since it also uses Java.
In case you don’t know, you are not allowed to code full applications in C/C++ on the Android.
You can only use it for specific parts of your application and are quite limited in what libraries you have available.
Java in the hands of a proper coder is quite powerful, shame that so many lousy coders do exist.
Wireless Enterprise Symposium
looks like a lame attempt at copying palm’s webos.
I can’t wait to upgrade my 9700.
I really like the phone, but I do have problems with application crashes and occasional freezes. The browser is sluggish, and some websites are impossible to navigate with it. The web browser upgrade is the most important feature IMO.
I can see why some people do not like the BB interface (vs the iPhone for example), but I personally like it just fine. I don’t use very many 3rd party apps, so I can’t comment on the quality of BB apps.
Maybe I just like my 9700 so much because I switched from Windows Mobile, and that phone, the Blackjack II, was the worst phone I ever owned.
Try upgrading the Phone OS, or if you did upgrade try downgrading. I found sometimes my wireless providers upgrades have significant problems with them. Using a different OS version can often fix this (referring to app crashes and locking up).
For a browser, you could try Opera Mini. It works decently well, but has the UI issues typical of Opera. It takes me a few attempts to close it sometimes. Ya.
It seems to me that Blackberries have always leaned towards the business/enterprise crowd and those that do a lot of commuting on business trips and such.
That being the case, why would you make a ad that’s obviously designed for iTards, with shitty, ultra-annoying hip-hop music in the background?
It’s called expanding to a new market segment, and it’s quite normal way to increase your market share. They already own the business/enterprise market, so expanding and attracting other types of customers makes sense.
… or why else would the woman in the film be moving like that in clothes shop – or is she getting electric shocks from a faulty blackberry?
And judging by the amount of time her breast are directed at the camera, BB’s marketing team seem to think their core users are men… who don’t get any.
That film is completely dumb… almost as bad as an apple advert with their annoyingly 5h!t choice of music. Don’t have sound at work so I can’t tell if has the same kind of crap music as an apple ad, but it looks like it probably does.
Unless the product is target specifically at women, you should expect boobs in the ad.
Even if it is targeted at women, boobs might appear just to make the women watching feel worse about there bodies.
tl;dr boobs are a cornerstone of the advertising world.
From the lyrics…
Blackeyed Peas (in their own opinion): so three thousand and eight
RIM: so two thousand and late