With BB10, RIM Tries To Break Out of the 'Mobile Ecosystem' Model

Alt-kun writes "This past week has seen a couple of interesting articles about Research In Motion's strategic plans for BlackBerry 10. The Globe and Mail thinks that by pushing HTML5 for app development, they want to make mobile applications platform-neutral, which would let them sell devices purely on the strength of the hardware and OS, rather than on the ecosystem. And the Guelph Mercury notes that they also plan to push BB10 as the basis for a whole range of mobile and embedded devices, not just phones and tablets. One example shown off at the recent developer conference was a Porsche with a BlackBerry entertainment system."

Comments

Why HTML5 apps suck on mobile

[WhiteArmor]

Native apps will always work better and be less resource intensive than HTML5 based apps. You will never be able to match native code or get even close. Even Google understands this on mobiles, even though they still use the crappy Java. This is especially important on mobile phones not only for limited CPU and memory and the lack of good GPU, but because battery life is really important and already not that great.

RIM just wants to do this because they don't have the vibrant app economy than Apple and even Microsoft has. They want others to do the work for them.

Re:Why HTML5 apps suck on mobile

[postbigbang]

It would be nice, but no one's bitching that their phone isn't fast enough. Native apps are lovely. Browser apps are lovely. What distinguishes Android and iOS is that there's a business model where lots of people get paid.

Watching videos isn't a business model anymore because the data plans are becoming mind-numbingly expensive. So what's left? Store-and-forward content viewing; low data rate interactives, including gaming. RIM has to offer something that's a monetary incentive to 1) carriers 2) developers 3) content providers 4) aggregators and CDNs and 5) all of these on an ongoing basis or no one's going to invest in doing BBx-specific stuff.

Apple has lots of salespeople and financial partners whose employer isn't Apple. So they promote Apple. Not so for RIM.

RIM gives no guarantees of privacy, security, or economy to increase their value from the user's context, either.

Speed isn't an issue, as phones are throttled by data rates that the carriers can support. Instead, things like actual security and real costs are the values.

Re:Why HTML5 apps suck on mobile

[Barbara, not Barbie]

One of the advantages of web apps in any scenario is the ease of cross platform compatibility

Sure, because HTML always renders the same on every browser and platform, always has, always will.

Except that it never had, and never will. Even Flash had better cross-platform compatibility (and better performance).

Re:Why HTML5 apps suck on mobile

[jo_ham]

Yep. I've got an unexpensive Android device with a QVGA screen. Native apps are a must with such a resolution because they just fit much better than websites. BTW, how is RIM going to push for HTML5 apps on iOS?

If that's their plan, I'm afraid you can stick a fork on RIM, they're done.

Why would it need to push for HTML5 apps on iOS? iOS already has them - they predate the App Store, and are still supported. If BB can get this working for them, which I doubt since the BB train has long since sailed in the US market, then they might be able to salvage something.

I think they have left it far too late, however, and they've been pushed into irrelevance by iOS and Android.

Re:Why HTML5 apps suck on mobile

[LordLimecat]

Im no programmer, but claiming something isnt modern is just a shady way of denigrating something for being well established. Essentially, where one person might say "its stable" or "time tested", youve found a way to turn that into a negative.

Arent latest, greatest fads usually just fads? Arent the most popular programming languages generally decades old (C++, Java)? Isnt one of the most popular languages for embedded devices (C) even older?

Re:Why HTML5 apps suck on mobile

[aztracker1]

Just want to point out that Java, C#, NodeJS, Python, etc. offer a very large advantage over lower level languages. That is a bit of isolation from typical issues resulting from poor memory management. It doesn't mean you shouldn't be aware, but allows you to concentrate more on the problem domain, instead of dealing with the ancillary issues of your development platform. Many operations in Java/C# in particular can be as fast as the same operations in C/C++, after JIT it is compiled code.

Beyond all of this, the overhead for Java/C# is typically less than 5-10%, with modern smart phones commonly running Ghz processors, even multi-core, the overhead isn't that big of an issue. The bigger issue is running applications in the background that aren't resource aware, and run blocking operations, or don't offload well. I think that as the developer frameworks for mobile evolve it will be even less of an issue.

Re:Sports cars at QNX

[localman57]

I think you're right. It appears that the tail is now wagging the dog. Six months ago, RIM was a handset maker that happened to be using QNX. It appears that they have now transformed into an OS maker that happens to be making Handsets. Almost as if QNX aquired RIM, not the other way around.

Logical extension of QNX

[ArhcAngel]

QNX is the OS of choice for many auto manufacturers for their in dash hardware. Since BB 10 is QNX with a new GUI layer (Kinda reminiscent of another OS X product and its BSD/OpenStep heritage) doesn't that just seem like a logical evolutionary step?