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BlackBerry Devices May Run Android Apps
crankyspice writes "RIM is allegedly prepping the QNX-based operating system running their forthcoming PlayBook tablet to run Android applications, according to a Bloomberg article. As RIM has stated that the QNX platform will run at least some of its upcoming smartphones as well, this could cinch Android's status as the lingua franca of smartphone application environments, especially with BlackBerry's current market leadership and Android's explosive marketshare growth."
Is a job at RIM. You know what that is called?
Who knew?
Bistro Math says Gartner.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Would a clean-room implementation of an interpreter to run Dalvik bytecode actually evade the legal issues with Dalvik itself?
Presumably they have licensed Java properly for their mobile devices. Are they just going to translate Dalvik bytecode back to Java bytecode, and run Android applications that way?
Just another proletarian malcontent.
We need apps that truly are "content", the same way text, sound, and video are.. ie, playable pretty much anywhere. If Android can be that "format", we're saving a lot of sweat and tears.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
Now this is a game changer. If the PlayBook has all the enterprise-y features it claims, nice hardware as specified AND supports most of the Android Marketplace apps, I think I wouldn't want any other tablet device but that.
This may be more proof that Nokias action to become subsumed by Microsoft (and that's what it is) is a losing course of action for them.
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
if you cannot beat them - emulate them
This is a horrible idea. Why would anybody outside of RIM bother to write apps for Blackberry if this happens? If they're really doing this, it just proves that RIM doesn't care about the user experience for Blackberry users. To have apps from different platforms mixing will mean that there's no consistency in look and feel. Native Blackberry apps will dry up (even more than they already are). Soon, people will say, "Why buy a Blackberry when I'm just running Android apps?" I don't really care whether RIM does it, because I don't use Blackberry or Android. (I'm an iPhone user.) I just think it's a really stupid business move. It's going to be hard for RIM to survive as an independent company, but this certainly won't help.
Why are you still surprised when you're getting RIMmed, that the results are shit?
Horrible hardware? My ex's BB Curve got dropped into water about 5 times and survived. My old Bold suffered so many drops and pummelings I'm surprised it's still alive. Both had excellent keyboards which I now miss immensely having an Android phone.
It's underspecced, granted, but for communication, social networking and the like Blackberry is incredibly good at what it does.
I write bullshit
Actually, RIM hardware is quite good quality compared to most of the Android phones I've seen. Not the highest spec hardware, but reliable, solid, and with reasonable battery life. My friends' Android phones have dreadful battery life and feel clunky and toy-like in comparison.
Caveat Utilitor
We're close to that already. With AJAX type apps, Java, Flash, etc., it's possible to run apps on different platforms and still look the same, use the same code, etc..
I've been running Chrome as my browser recently and have used the app store. Whether running on Win7 or RHEL6 or Ubuntu 10.10, it looks and feels the same.
I was at a Blackberry event earlier this week (stuffed myself mad with shrimp, clams & crab legs!) and noticed that the Playbook could run multiple environments and not just BB6. One of the other environments was Webkit. Well Chrome is made from Webkit and on Monday I got a CR-48 from Google so I asked the guy if the Playbook would be able to run ChromeOS. He hemmed and hawed and I interjected that I had to ask something good because my boss was in the crowd. He ended up telling the crowd to watch for upcoming news about what exactly the Playbook could run.
I was amused.
--- rapper/producer/bachelorette party stripper
But does it run Angry Birds?
They know very well how it "helped" OS/2 to be able to run Windows software... which meant that nobody wrote native OS/2 applications -- it ran Windows apps after all.
One thing I'm always wondering in these OS wars: You can take Android, leave out the Google App market and other Google apps and add your own instead. OK, this is some work but you're free from Google then, you don't even have to pay them license fees, and whatever you have to do yourself you had to do for your very own OS anyway: Write apps, supply services, build an ecosystem.
Microsoft could have done this: Build on Android, use Bing instead of Google, supply cloud services, offer an app market. And offer a port of MS Office. Instant victory.
RIM could have done that: Build on Android, add all the RIM messaging magic and some security features: Hit.
Nokia could have done that: Build on Android, adapt for low-end hardware (and Android *comes* from low-end hardware, at first it even didn't support touch screens), offer some high-end smartphones. They have 2500 developers working on Symbian (unbelievable but true). Discontinue Symbian, let those devs work on Nokia Android.
I mean, Android is Open Source, isn't it? OK, all the Google stuff isn't, but base Android is. Even if you don't get access to the Google Market it's easier to be fully compatible and just get the app developers to sell through your store instead of forcing them to outright port their apps.
I just don't get it.
And where's the Free Android distribution? With an own market with only Open Source apps? No, there's MeeGo instead... yet.
Actually, that's what killed OS/2 (and yes, I was there). It had no Win32 compatibility, nor did it have device driver compatibility. Hence, it could never gain any traction, especially with Microsoft developer-friendly policies (and IBM's developer antagonistic policies). When IBM started selling PCs with both OS/2 and Windows 3.1 (!!) installed, and you had to actually go through a number of steps to change over to Windows 3.1, people still chose 3.1 simply because of the application and hardware compatibility.
It is true that IBM licensed Win16, but that was pretty much headed out the door at the time.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
If so I'd be overjoyed the hardware could handle a pummelling, given how much that damn game frustrates me.
I write bullshit
If the shell is going to be the same as Android you may as well run android.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
What the hell does Nokia have to do with TFA?
http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/08/myriad-alien-dalvik-runs-android-apps-on-any-phone-starting/
What killed OS/2 was that it had Win16 compatability, which let a lot of air out of the tires of any vendor tempted to build a native port of their app to OS/2. Then Win32 came along and the apps that would run on OS/2 slowly aged and faded away.
You really think OS/2 would have done better with *less* compatibility? Developers would've flocked to re-writing their applications because the OS/2 API was so superior and their applications would be so much better that they would make oodles of more money?
I'm just not seeing how developers would've been attracted to rewriting their applications for a (very) minority product.
Versus this scenario: IBM makes OS/2 Win32 and device driver compatible, and then advertises that they're "Absolutely, positively, 100% Windows compatible, except better in way A, B, C, ...."
The reason Microsoft won and everyone else lost is because Microsoft has always understood that backward compatibility is essential to success.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Maybe "emulating" is a too strong words for this. But anyway, is running programs made for one platform in another. And isnt the first case, you have wine, plenty of console emulators, virtual machines, and other approachs to make layers of compatibility.
As a clear pro, you have more apps/games/whatever. You have all the advantages of your current platform (stability, security, multitasking or some special native apps), and being able to run apps made for another. But as con you make devels to not develop for you platform too, and also somewhat say what your platform is not, and if the compatibility/emulation layer is not 100% perfect always will be something that will not run that could press your consume to "downgrade" to your competitors offering.
Of course, if the alternative is not to have those apps at all (at least not until getting popular enough, and you can get there into a chicken-egg situation) probably the best move would be to go forward with that.
Actually, I was thinking it was the opposite - very good for Blackberry, and somewhat harmful for Android.
Here I'm speaking specifically of the Playbook. What Android tablet right now looks very compelling if you can run Android stuff on a Playbook later this year?
To me it seems like it could impact the momentum of the wave of Android tablets about to hit.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The only problem I have had is the damn trackball, with my first curve the ball actually fell out and with my second it just stopped working...overall though the rest of the phone was great..I did notice the new ones ditched the trackball for a joystick so im assuming I wasnt the only one with trackball problems.
THIS could cinch it? The company I work for moves at the pace of a glacier. We're still running windows XP, office 2003 and and just got through a 2 year approval process to finally stop using IE6. But about a month after the first Androids were out they were approved and and deployed to nearly every manager in the company. It seems pretty cut and dry to me, Blackberry is dead and apple never really had a chance anyway. Whats sad is Microsoft could have had this market sewn up a decade ago but it seems like they've spent the past 10 years figuring out just how much fail they could stuff inside a PDA sized device. The fact that Palm Inc was kicking their ass back then with what could only be described as an OS slightly more sophisticated than an Atari 2600 (minus the color) should have told them something. Android, like all good ideas is something that you look at/use and then say "Oh yea, this is what everyone should have been doing all along." If I'm paying hundreds of dollars for a small device that I'm surely going to end up destroying in my washer at some point, the damned thing better do WHAT I want WHEN I want and HOW I want. I don't need Apple or Microsoft crawling up my ass, and for christs sake I don't need MS Office or iTunes on every god damned computer on earth. I know they make you guys a lot of money but for fucks sake, if I want that shit I'll put it on myself. Microsoft at least should have learned from their success, you make your software free, easy, unobtrusive until it becomes ubiquitous. Then when the whole world is dependent on you, you bring out the Vaseline and inform them that what follows will be just a tad less uncomfortable than what they'd have to go through to migrate away from your shit.
It's a quality build, sure, I'll giver you that. but it lacks in features and performance. Every argument about the hardware being great for RIM can be summed up with 1) It takes a beating 2) it has a keyboard. How about capable hardware with quality features. HTC and Samsung blow anything RIM has out to kingdom come. Arguing that RIM makes great hardware because it's a quality build is like arguing that a pioneer wagon is a great vehicle because it can handle rough terrain.
We're going to be dumping our BlackBerrys and our BES CALs because the Android and IOS devices can do almost as much, with far less security. The reality is that the big bosses want the latest high-tech jewelry, and the BB is The Old Stuff.
But RIM is fixated on selling the hardware of it's BB phone. The PlayBook is a large screen and keyboard for the BB phone. Your corporate email is still kept in the BB phone - not the PlayBook. I've got bad news for you RIM: no-one wants to wear two phones, one for work and one for personal. Even though the personal phones aren't nearly as good as the BB from a security standpoint, they are good enough. And frankly they are better at email/calendar/PIM/chat. Bye bye BB. And with that, I don't need a PlayBook either.
As an admin who has the duty to protect our information assets, I would far prefer to have those assets protected by our BES. It's an established solution and works well.
Instead of trying to make the PlayBook drag the BB along as the second phone (three devices total (are you serious RIM???)), they should be trying to give me the protection of the BES in my IOS or Android device. One device plus high security - that is an easy sell. At least this way they could keep that BES CALs revenue coming in.
Another thing wrong with switching over to personal phones is the mixing of personal data with the corporate data. But it will happen because the personal phone apps see integration as a good thing - it increases the data mining potential.
RIM is trying to make the walled garden larger by importing Android apps. I would far far prefer that my IOS or Android be able to launch the tiny walled (fortified with extreme prejudice) garden of my corporate data protected by the BES.
"The most sensible request of government we make is not, "Do something!" But "Quit it!"
I have been known to throw my blackberry curve across the room when it wakes me up on Sunday morning. It still works as well as the day I got it. It also has 3x the battery life of my Motorola Milestone. (Yes I have two phones, Work and Personal).
There are not very many phones with the battery life, durability, and functionality of my blackberry.
Curious about Storage and Virtualization? Check out
Huh? Lingua Franca has nothing to do with how many people speak it natively. With Alien Dalvik and now this development you will be able to write one Android app and have it run on all platforms. ('cept iOS maybe... unless you jailbreak).
If iOS apps continue to only run on iOS, then it will be a parochial dialect no matter how many apps are written for it.
Troll.
First, cite a fucking source. I call bullshit.
Second, you mix like half a dozen bullshit numbers together.
Third, your bullshit numbers don't even fucking make sense. If iOS sold 99.4% of all smart phone apps in 2009, and the very next year they had their lunch eaten by apparently everyone and are down to 25%, I would say that they are pretty well fucked. Going from near 100% of the market to a quarter of it in a single year is a sure sign that you are flat dead. Better sell you stock in Apple and buy some in RIM, because they apparently had at least 2600% growth from 2009 to 2010 according to your clearly non-fucking-sense numbers.
When Linux has Win32 compatibility that's "absolutely, positively 100% compatible" then we can talk.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
It looks like the industry is going to HTML 5 for that kind of thing. For business-type apps that you don't care what they look like, internal apps or whatever, a lot of companies seem to be doing that. The only people who are staying native are people who care what their app looks like on an individual phone, or people who need excellent graphics or something like that.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I manage mobile development for a small shop (10 Developers + Graphics Artist + Photographer/Videographer) as well as created three apps last year using Phonegap to release for iOS & Android.
The apps I developed had "free" ad supported "lite" versions. Basically these were the proof of concept versions that had all the functionality and I wanted to just get out the door. Then I would spend another week or two fine tuning the apps and adding support of handset hardware like the ability to take and save pictures with Phonegap, etc. to create a "full" version with no ads for $.99 or $1.99. What I discovered was that Android users don't buy apps. I had 25k more Android downloads of the lite version of my app yet Android sales were less than 15% of my total sales. After talking with my friends and co-workers who had Android phones I noticed the same trend. Very few had paid apps and if they did it was 1 or 2. They didn't have a lot of free apps either outside of maybe Facebook and Urbanspoon. What I did find interesting was that most of these people owned iPhone Touches and interestingly enough, had bought more apps for their iPod than their phones. It will be interesting how many to see how many of these folks switch from Android to the iPhone because most of my none techie friends admit they WANTED an iPhone, but was going to deal with AT&T. They wanted Verizon (and where some live it's perfectly understandable) They got an Android phone because it was the "closest" Verizon had to an iPhone at the time.
Now at work, the company treated iPhone and Android as "platforms" at the beginning (Fall 2009) through about October of last year and then we had to change how to billed and priced to our clients frankly because Android was eating our lunch in QA. This was due to new handsets every month and a new OS version every quarter. By the time we got the bugs all solved with one, two more popped up. So instead of charging by OS we started CHARGING BY HANDSET/DEVICE. I think that gets lost on a lot of people here. We found that Android turned into developing for blackberry only instead of having 1 or 2 versions of the OS in the wild with blackberry Android had like 6 and a new one every quarter it seemed. Palm was much closer to iPhone with pretty much 1 OS and 2 devices.
We found we could do QA on the iPhone/iPod Touch for $X. We'd been developing for a couple years on the platform and there isn't a lot of hardware differences. Our first iPad apps fell under this, but people complained they were too "iPhone line", which they were just ports of the iPhone app. So we developed a format that worked better on that device, if people want the iPad version it is $Y. Want the iOS family it is $X + $Y. Basically it's 1 price because there is 1 iPhone by 1 manufacture. And it sees updates on a yearly and predictable basis.
With Android, $X will buy you the app + QA for the Nexus One (now S) and the latest stable version of Android. If they want QA on any additional Android Handsets, it costs $Y per handset. Typically they'll want Droid (Verizon), HTC(Sprint/Verizon/others), and Samsung(AT&T/Others). This makes developing for Android typically anywhere from 3x - 5x more expensive for our clients. If the clients are giving the software away free, this is usually not a problem. We did have 2 clients who were charging for their apps actually drop Android on the next version because they found out what I did: not enough people bought them.
We didn't hear too many complaints from our clients when it explain it to them, but to be fair, this is how we priced Blackberry before with $X for the app, $Y per handset for QA so it wasn't like they had seen it before.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Apple responsible for 99.4% of mobile app sales in 2009
My figures taken from Mobile App Store Market Share Based on Usage
The expectation that Android will overtake Apple is a prediction of future growth to 2015, not existing sales.
Using a blackberry, internal messaging is free. For businesses this can be a big plus, as they don't have to pay for any messaging between employees.
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
are we talking about compliant, or compatible?
because WINE is implementing the win32 specs more accurately than microsoft itself.
Looking for people to chat about multicopters, coding, music. skype: gtsiros
The TB not working is a known issue and easily fixed most of the time. I've had to fix upward of 50 of them. Trackball on a phone is a bad idea, they are grime & lint magnets.
Untrue. At the time, OS/2 was the best platform for running Win16 apps. If you wanted to run them on a stable platform, you wanted OS/2. The reason that you didn't buy OS/2 was that it required twice as much RAM (when RAM was expensive), a faster processor, and the OS itself cost more than DOS+Win3.1, so you'd end up spending twice as much on a computer that ran OS/2. Even without native applications, OS/2 was a more attractive platform than Windows 3.11, if you didn't factor in the cost.
The thing that killed OS/2 was, as other posters have said, the lack of win32 support. OS/2 wasn't a market leader, but it was doing pretty well until Window 95 was released. Then it lost the application compatibility and died - it was still a better platform for running win16 apps, but even people who wanted to mostly run win16 apps had one or two win32 apps (e.g. MS Office) that they wanted to use as well.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Every argument about the hardware being great for RIM can be summed up with 1) It takes a beating 2) it has a keyboard.
Correction: it has a really good keyboard that puts others to shame. It's difficult to overstate this: if you really want to thumb-type fast, there's no other keyboard like it.
Thats funny, In December I got my first smartphone, an HTC Desire. Since 2008, I have had a work Blackberry. I fucking hate typing on that thing. We just got new blackberries 2 weeks ago (The new bold I think, I don't care). It's even WORSE to type on. The keys no longer have gaps and have little raised bits. It is fricking horrible to type on.
I hate blackberries.I really, passionately hate that thing, with a passion. Hate it.
Typing is so much easier on my Android phone. The auto correction on typing errors is a million times better than on the BB. With such small keys, either tactile or touch, it's all about the autocorrect system in my mind and the Android one is streets ahead.
All just my opinion, but it goes to show that not ALL people who say "iPhone/Android/$touchscreen is better than BB/$tactile" are giving uninformed opinion.
1+ Ghz CPU? Nope.
I think that's what everyone's getting at. My Torch has the same CPU as the Bold it replaced, which, while disappointing, isn't really holding the phone back.
You see, people, when you're talking about mobile devices running services which require at least the illusion of real-time access to the hardware, you're talking about an OS which gives background services priority. When that's what you're talking about, it's not only possible, but probable, that apps can and will run faster a system with more efficiently coded services (e.g. they use less RAM and fewer CPU cycles) and a slower CPU and less RAM than the same apps would run on a less efficiently coded system with a faster CPU and more RAM.
Windows can do this; go ahead, enable the feature, then install a few daemons and open them up to the public. Watch what happens to that game you love to play oh-so-much when those services are getting hammered. Ok, now turn off that feature but leave the services running. Game runs better, right? You can do the same test in Linux, if you know where to look, as well.
Here's why:
When you give priority to background services, those services will ALWAYS get CPU, RAM, and I/O resources BEFORE the applications you want to run. The end result is that, when those services need resources, when they're getting hammered, when some obscure (or not so obscure) bug triggers a care condition in one of those services, your apps slow to a crawl.
Ok, so why's my Torch seem more responsive than my Bold, given the same CPU at the same clock speed? Is it because it has more RAM? Probably not, I never really maxed-out the Bold's RAM so that wasn't holding it back. No, I'm pretty sure if I shoehorned BBOS 6 onto the Bold, I'd see the same responsiveness from it that I see from the Torch. Why? Do you really have to ask? I'm pretty sure I just explained it.
Now, as a counter-example, I had a Palm Pixi+ in the interim time between the Bold and the Torch (my fiancee's Curve was having battery issues and the Pixi+ was cheaper than a new battery so I got that and gave her the Bold). The Pixi+ has 256MB of RAM and a 600Mhz CPU, while the Bold weighs in with the same amount of RAM and a CPU that's only 24Mhz faster. That's a difference of only 4% so I really shouldn't have noticed much, right? Wrong. The services on the Pixi+ (specifically the window manager, which I never saw using less than 33% of available RAM or 50% of the CPU) are so inefficient that simple things like sending a text message or initiating a call took several seconds (sometimes more than 10 or 20) rather than being almost instantaneous! There were times that I would miss a call entirely, despite having pressed the answer button on the first ring, because the window manager and some other kernel task were hogging CPU cycles, so the phone and radio services couldn't process my keypress quickly enough! I know it's not a CPU issue, given that the Curve I had before the Bold didn't have these issues and it only brought 32MB and 312Mhz to the table and it was infinitely more responsive than the Pixi+.
What most people, and I'm guessing that includes the /. population (and obviously a large portion of the smartphone OS development community who, for the most part, can't seem to develop system services in such a way as to not require a 1+Ghz CPU and a gig of RAM in order to leave anything available to the user), don't realize is that our phones are servers and, as such, run operating systems designed to give daemons and system processes priority over user processes. The end result, and I can't drive this point home nearly enough, is that a phone with a slower CPU and less RAM can perform noticeably better, run more apps (simultaneously!!), and run those apps faster than a phone with a faster CPU and more RAM.
It's not just theory, it's reality; look at the iPhone or any Android phone vs. the Torch. Every iPhone (save for the original, which shipped with a CPU that was 4Mhz slower) and every Android phone sh
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
My buddy had his BB Curve eaten by a dog (really severly chewed, half the casing on the right side is missing, boards exposed, etc...) about 2 years ago. He never turned it off or pulled the battery to let the slobber dry up; he just wiped it off as well as he could with a paper towel. He's still using it, as is. Even covered in slobber to the point that any other phone would have shorted out and released its magic smoke, he was able to use it to call me and laugh about what had just happened.
The only issue it has is with bluetooth connectivity. Sometimes it gets a little flaky, but that's the nature of bluetooth, from what I've seen.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.