Recap of DevCon

If you read my DevCon expectations you will notice that they are very different from what was actually announced. In short everything that was not directly BBX related was ignored at the event, so no announcements about BBM 6.0.1 or the 9380 Curve.

Things talked about at DevCon

  • PlayBook OS 2.0
    Released only as a developer beta. Actual release has been pushed till next February which is a huge disappointment.
  • Android Apps
    Unless they can get the apps out of the ‘Android Player’ and allow them to run like native apps, this is going to be a disappointing aspect of some BBX apps.
  • NDK
    Was officially released as expected
  • AIR 3.0
    Included as part of OS 2.0 however native extensions actually work on AIR 2.0 and OS 1.0.7 so devs do not need to wait for that aspect of the SDK
  • Cascades
    The only real announcement at DevCon, the Cascades UI from TAT looks like a joy to use. It should make great UI easy to create, and runs very fast. The beta will be available in November, with version 1.0 going live in March.

Things confirmed dead (by omission)

  • BB Java
    It has been pretty obvious for awhile that RIM was going to take this approach, but it is still pretty disappointing. You can’t even really give RIM credit for finally being honest about this because for the most part they confirmation came more from what they didn’t say then from what they did.
  • 3G/LTE PlayBooks
    I still think that we will see these eventually, but not until after the next hardware refresh. They are not yet confirmed dead, but at this point RIM has really passed up their chance to release them. It would have been much better if the company had been up front about this from the beginning.