Slashdot Mirror
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?
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.
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
My understanding is that(unlike copyrights) patents are unaffected by cleanroom/non-cleanroom status. A patent confers a monopoly, for a limited time, on whatever it covers, period, whether the other party is copying you, an independent discoverer, or cleanrooming.
On the other hand, since Blackberries have traditionally run a JVM, Sun licenced and all, they would presumably have a license to use the patents at issue. I don't know whether the license under which they have that use would preclude their producing a "Dalvik mode", which would be mostly the same as their JVM; but with the necessary changes to run Android stuff...
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.
How is it germane who made the device?
Especially with regard to a story such as this where it is clearly the OPERATING system inter-compatibility that Rim is shooting for when making Android Apps run on Rim systems. The story isn't about making HTC apps run on a Blackberry.
The whole point of the article is about how Number Three is going to ride the coat tails of Number Two's apps in a desperate bid to preserve market share.
I seriously doubt Rim finds any consolation in the fact that they are getting beat by 4 or 5 manufacturers all wielding the same stick instead of one single competitor. Its pretty hard to put that on the bottom line in a 10K.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
If so I'd be overjoyed the hardware could handle a pummelling, given how much that damn game frustrates me.
I write bullshit
Are they just going to translate Dalvik bytecode back to Java bytecode, and run Android applications that way?
It would have to be something like that, though I doubt it will be on-the-fly. And Android isn't just Dalvik, it has its own set of APIs and a core Linux kernel as well. I posted some thoughts on this a couple weeks back over at InfoWorld.
Breakfast served all day!
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.
I don't think the problem is the Java license.
In order to be able to be able use of the Sun/Oracle patents, the VM (Dalvik or a clean-room version of it) must pass the TCK (compatibility suite). Since Oracle will not license the TCK, passing this compatibility test is impossible. Therefore, shipping a VM without this would would violate the Oracle patents (just like what Google is being sued about). In order to implement a JVM on the BB, they would have to use the certified Java ME, which is crap and pretty pointless since it won't give them the Android platform their looking for.
The only way I can see BB pulling this off is to use Java ME for the JVM, implement the Android API on top of it, and translate the Dalvik binaries back to bytecode as you suggest above. From what I know about the Dalvik format, that would be quite a challenge, but who knows.
I suppose it's possible that BB could be getting some special dispensation from Oracle to get around the patent issue, but I find it highly unlikely that Oracle is going to help anyone wanting to put Android on their platform.
Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of an oncoming train.
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.
QNX is one of the few systems in the world that is aged and reliable. Enough to run industrial systems. Android is a few decades behind still.