Blackberry Smartphone maker RIM has been behind iPhone and Android to provide ‘A’ class user experience. RIM’s market share has dropped down drastically from 41% in 2007 to 4% in 2012. Although it has been able to improve shares in India and China with mid-range smartphones, the future still looks bleak.
Playbook: Not so good user review
RIM which was pitching QNX based playbook device but did not get a good market response mainly because of the lack of essential features when the device was launched. Another setback relates to emails, Blackberry device need to be connected as a bridge for sending and receiving emails. It’s also the lack of good quality apps that are pushing end users to Android and iPad devices.
Fate of BlackBerry Java based Phones:
RIM has lately realized that improving its java based blackberry OS would not provide the end user experience that is present in Android and iPhone devices. As RIM’s legacy OS was built with key based user interface in mind, it is not scalable enough to handle touch based user interfaces smoothly. With people preferences switching from a keyboard based device to a touch based device, it becomes hard for RIM to sell their legacy OS device.
BlackBerry 10 in News:
With the vision all set to work on developing a fast and smooth touch based device, Blackberry announced BlackBerry 10 in late 2011 to play in the smartphone market. RIM however has been delaying the launch of the device, now scheduled for Feb 2013. Hopefully, there would be no key features missing in their new device as was the case with Playbook.
Overview of BlackBerry 10:
Let me give an overview of the BlackBerry 10. It has QNX as the operating system which is time tested and extensively used in modern car systems, rocket launches and Nuclear power plants. Mobile application development in QNX can be done using either native C/C++, Web Works, Adobe Air . BlackBerry 10 can also run android applications using android runtime player.
BlackBerry 10 native development
The native development is done using QNX Momentics IDE which provides drag and drop features for faster UI creation. It also has a very good UI previewer which can greatly reduce developer effort as it directly updates the UI in the previewer when you do changes in the QML document.
BlackBerry 10 uses cascades UI framework for developing rich and intuitive UI with 2D and 3D effects. The developers have two options for developing UI , writing code in C++ or using the markup (QML) . QML provides a more easier and flexible way for making UI. Various fine grained UI behaviors can be provided by using QML. Many of the cool UI components have been
