Contributor: Oluwaseni Odebiyi is a mobile application developer with great skills on J2ME, BlackBerry, Android and iOS and most of his mobile applications are running on different mobile market. He reports live for oTeKBits from the #BBDevCon (Amsterdam).There was a free BlackBerry PlayBook for everyone that attended the event upon registering your presence at the event. This is to help developers to create and test their applications on the device. The new CEO, Thorstein Heins, opened the BlackBerry Devcon in Amsterdam to over 2000 developers/CIOs from different part of the world.Vivek Bhardwaj, head of software Portfolio EMEA, couldn’t finish up his presentation on the BlackBerry Bridge 2.0, “Open On…” allows you to open a photo or other document from your BlackBerry smartphone onto your BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet with one click.
There has been a lot of excitement today about the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet developer promotion for Android developers, as introduced by Alec Saunders, VP Developer Relations.Alec Saunders also gave interesting stastistic on why developers need to start/continue developing on the RIM platforms:
- 6 million blackberry app downloads per day
- BlackBerry users download more PAID apps on average than Android users do.
- 13% of BlackBerry developers made more than $100,000 from BlackBerry App world apps, more than Android or Apple developers.
There was a presentation on the process of porting Android apps which has now become a few simple clicks.
The benefit of working with the BlackBerry Java Plug-in for Eclipse, and why it has always been important for Second Gear Games to run apps on BlackBerry devices.Also there was a presentation on porting Qt app on the BlackBerry Playbook, that was really awesome if you ask me.Other details given listed below:
- BlackBerry Playbook OS 2.0 is on track to be delivered late February
- RIM are reducing friction with easy access to development tools on new site, no registration will be needed
- App World 3.1. Carrier billing built in; has the ability to buy and send app as gif to anyone; can buy app on request
- 65% of phones in Europe, ME, Africa, Asia-Pac not yet smartphones. Key to growth area to Blackberry
There was also different training session for developers on getting familiar with different features on the BlackBerry Playbook, the most interesting one for me was the NFC capability on the BlackBerry 7, as most phones that will be release within the next 4-6 months will all be NFC enabled.Finally, there was a great party to end the 1st day session, it was awesome!See other photos from Day 1 at the #BBDevCon on our Flickr page
