Thoughts on BlackBerry Devcon2010 from a BlackBerry developer

A few bullet-point thoughts about the announcements at Devcon2010:

• RIM recognized Eki Baskoro (an Indonesian developer, BTW) for his contribution in creating the Facebook BlackBerry SDK. First of all, good for RIM to recognize this man’s hard work. Second of all, seriously, RIM? Have you no care at all about Facebook that an outside developer beat you to developing this SDK on his own? In RIM’s own words, this SDK is “still in its infancy”. Well, welcome to 2008.    
• The announcement of the BlackBerry tablet, the PlayBook, is exciting. Will the PlayBook compete in the market? The PlayBook’s strength could be its integration with corporate emails, although it needs to pair with a BlackBerry phone to do that. So if I already had my BlackBerry phone to read corporate emails, it wouldn’t really matter if my tablet does the same thing. I would pick my tablet based on features and apps. Among tablets, PlayBook may have the best horsepower, but it will have much less apps than the iPad and the Android tablets. Also, the PlayBook is supposed to come out in early 2011 and by that time, we’ll likely have the second-generation iPad with better features.
• The BBM Social Platform is probably the best news to me personally. The BBM (BlackBerry Messenger) has always been BlackBerry’s unique strength. With OS 5, RIM enhanced the BBM into a mini social network. Now they are extending it again by opening it up to developers. This is a big deal because now developers can tap directly into the BBM “social network” and build in-app features like invite friends, data transfer and update profiles. If you’re developing an app specifically for the BlackBerry platform, your users’ BBM contacts are more valuable than their Facebook and Twitter friends. You would only care about your users’ BBM contacts because you know they are also BlackBerry users.

Overall, I think RIM is moving in the right direction, albeit too slowly for me. The availability of APIs still lags behind mobile platform leaders like iOS and Android. The Facebook SDK tardiness I wrote above is a no-brainer. I’ll pick some other examples from this recent survey by Appcelerator and IDC:

• Geo-location feature — wanted by 69% of developers surveyed. Official solution from RIM is only available since July 2010.
• Barcode scanning feature — wanted by 31% of developers surveyed. Official solution from RIM is only available for OS 6, which is currently a very small part of the BlackBerry platform.  

RIM needs to hurry up. They need to overtake, not just catch up.