You may have heard the news of RIM's Blackberry Playbook supporting a numerous array of developer support (Android, Adobe Flash (previously announced), AirPlay and Unity games developers, C/C++) as well as it's own Blackberry smartphone community. Android, you say? Yes, Android.
Cut down, the Playbook will be able to play Android Apps, although via a certified emulator. The key problem here, is that developers need not programme apps specifically for the Playbook. That might not sound too bad, but anyone who's tried to play smartphone apps on a tablet will know that the outcome isn't always too great.
But again, the underlying problem is that if the Playbook will play Android Apps, there is no need to develop apps for the Playbook. Ever. Blackberry's aren't known for there masses of apps, whilst Android is the second highest count of apps available on market (iOS being number 1).
So, you spend all this money on a Blackberry tablet, yet you're playing Android apps. Also, this highly odd inclusion doesn't really say much for RIM's confidence of the Playbook taking on Apples reign of the tablet world.
[UPDATE]
We have a statement from RIM's co-CEO Jim Balsillie, who, in a nutshell, says the Android inclusion is too "tick the thousands of Apps box". He also said that anyone wanting to play high performance apps, gaming etc, will want to create custom Playbook apps via QNX developer kit. See the full statement below, but we've got to say, RIM aren't painting the Playbook in the best of lights.
"First of all, what we announced is Gingerbread. This is not Honeycomb. I don't know what the number of Honeycomb apps is, but it's not very many. Whereas Gingerbread they've got lots of them. You've got the volume of the handset apps, so if you're looking for the tonnage of apps, or some kind of long tail stuff, you've got it.
At the end of the day, people are going to want performance. You're just not going to get things like gaming and multimedia, you're not going to get the speed going through a VM interface. If you want content, or Flash type stuff, or you're looking at AIR-type, evolving web-type assets, that's what you're going to do.
There's no compromise here. You've got the tonnage of apps. And you've got the performance. Do I think the tonnage is overplayed? Yes.
But if you think it's about having a couple hundred thousand apps, there you go.
Do we believe it's about super high performance? Yes. Do we believe it's about full web fidelity? Yes. These are concepts that were really relegated as not technically possible, which we're doing here. This is a no compromise environment.
If you want to work on Android, great. Do we think people will want to migrate web assets? Yes. Do we think they're going to want super high performance native assets with the SDK? Absolutely. You think they're going to want to use their Flash based stuff for an offline Flash/AIR type environment? Yes.
I'm just not interested in these sort of religious application tonnage issues. I really think we put that issue to bed. And if you think the whole world's going to want to develop for Gingerbread, fine. Do I think that's going to happen? Then why is there a different environment for a tablet? And you know about the performance issues and you know about the app volume issues, cause it's tough. And that's why QNX matters.
That's why people are saying, Is this stuff going to go more in the browser and HTML 5 and more native? These are going to be strong trends. But if you want these app players for different VMs -- and don't forget we have 25,000 BlackBerry 6 apps. So, at the end of the day, we believe this is going to be about performance. It's going to be about enterprise greatness. Things like multi-threaded capability, symmetric multiprocessing. We believe it's about an uncompromised web. We believe it's about enterprise security. True multitasking, not with suspension -- and that matters because you're going to want to run these things in the background.
But I'm out of the religious war on tonnage, which I'm delighted."
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