Don’t Forsake BlackBerry Development
Research in Motion is relying on BlackBerry 10 to be its salvation. While the newest OS version has a lot of promise, everyone was waiting to see how consumers would respond. It’s still a little early to tell, but BB10 is taking some forward steps. From Marketplace Tech:
RIM, the company that makes BlackBerry, has been taking a beating on Wall Street because sales of its smartphones have slowed and it posted a loss in the first three quarters of the fiscal year.
John Butler, a telecom analyst at Bloomberg Industries, says analysts didn’t expect the fourth quarter to be much different.
‘BlackBerry did surprise the street. What they did was sold 1 million BlackBerry 10 phones and it only shipped in the last month of the quarter,’ says Butler.
The company reportedly lost users last year, so they have some catching up to do internally before they can even start playing catch-up to the bigger mobile systems. Still, with the Blackberry Z10 just recently hitting the US market, this isn’t a bad position to be in as RIM moves forward. From Time:
The earnings provide a first glimpse of how the BlackBerry 10 system, widely seen as crucial to the company’s future, is selling internationally and in Canada since its debut Jan. 31. The 1 million new touch-screen BlackBerry Z10 phones were above the 915,000 that analysts had been expecting. Details on U.S. sales are not part of the fiscal fourth quarter’s financial results because the Z10 just became available there last week, after the quarter ended.
This news came on the coattails of the announcement that there are now more than 100,000 apps available for BB10. How’d BlackBerry accomplish that so quickly? By including an emulator on devices like the Z10 that allows Android apps to run on the BlackBerry device, according to All Things D.
Knowing that not all developers are ready to bet on a native app, the company has offered some shortcuts designed to get programs running on devices like its Z10, which went on sale this week at AT&T.
One of those is an emulation engine that allows Android apps to run. Roughly 20 percent of the 100,000 BlackBerry 10 apps fall into this category, according to Martyn Mallick, BlackBerry’s vice president for global alliances and business development. “We give them a very nice on-ramp to get onto the platform,” Mallick said in an interview Tuesday. “Our users deserve to have great content. If that is the fastest way we can get some of that content, that’s great.”
So don’t count BlackBerry out yet. You might even want to invest in a Z10 for mobile app testing purposes.
