For two straight months now the rate of upgrades to OS 5.0 has remained unchanged. January’s rates of OS 5 use on the devices that can be upgraded from OS 4.x are almost unchanged from November, and in a few cases even down. Given this stability it seems unlikely to expect any further change in these numbers in the future. (The overall use of OS 5 or higher has continued to increased as RIM is no longer selling devices with OS 4.6 or 4.7).
The Hockey Scores application has been updated to version 2.4 adding the ability to use an in application purchase to remove advertising, and improvements to getting data over wi-fi connections. Also support for keyboard shortcuts was recently added in version 2.3 of the application.
Remove Advertising
The Hockey Scores application now gives the option to make a one time payment of 99¢ in order to permanently remove all advertising in the application. This takes advantage of the new APIs available in version 2.1 of BlackBerry AppWorld in order to allow the purchase to be made inside of the application. This option will be shown in both the menu, and on the about page, but only to those users running BlackBerry AppWorld 2.1 or higher.
Device Support
Hockey Scores supports all BlackBerry Devices with OS 4.6 or higher, but version 2.4 is limited to devices running OS 5.0 or higher.
Liar’s Dice has been updated to version 1.2 with better OS 6 support, crisper graphics and a smaller file size.
About Liar’s Dice
This application is a dice game of strategy and deception in which seeing only your own dice you must bet on the combined dice in play without getting caught in a lie. The game is popular in many different cultures and is also known by the names Perudo, Dudo, or Cachito.
The object of the game is to catch your opponent (the computer) betting too high. Bets are placed on both your own dice which you can see, and your opponent’s dice which are hidden from you. You begin each round by making a bet. The computer then has an opportunity to either call your bet a lie, or to bet higher then you. Then it is once again your turn to call your opponent’s bet or to bet even higher. This continues until eventually a bet is called. Then if the bet is too high the caller wins, or if the bet is not a lie, the bettor wins the round.
The game has two main game modes. The “High Score” mode is the default mode, points are awarded for each round, and the first to gain a given number of points wins. The amount of points that the game plays to can be selected from the options page, allowing for shorter or longer games.
The second game mode is an “Elimination” mode in which the loser of each round loses one dice for the following rounds, and the last player with any dice left is the winner. This game is more dynamic as there are a different number of dice in play each round. Additionally these games in this mode typically play faster than high score games.
Improvements in Version 1.2
This version adds improved support device running OS 6.0 making use of some new API’s that are available in the newer operating system.
The graphics have also been cleaned up a bit on all devices, giving the images a crisper look. Also the overall file size of the application has decreased for all devices by an average of 17.7%.
Video
Device Support
Version 1.2 of Liars Dice requires OS 5.0+ and supports the 8350i, 8520, 8530, 8900, 9000, 9300, 9330, 9500, 9520, 9530, 9550, 9630, 9650, 9700, 9780, and 9800.
Way back in September I declared the BlackBerry Pearl to be dead, and now five months later see no reason to change that assessment. Despite (finally) being launched on AT&T, the market share of the 91xx series remains remarkably small. In the month of December the 9100 and 9105 combine for 0.7% of all downloads of Pixelated, and 1.1% of all downloads of the Hockey Scores application. For both applications this is a smaller percentage then the Nextel branded Curve 8350i, and for Pixelated is tied with the GSM version of the BlackBerry Storm 2. Additionally it is already significantly behind the Bold 9780 which was hardly even released by this time.
The only other BlackBerry model with such a small market is the 9670 Style. Given that it has an identical screen resolution, the BlackBerry Style should really be thought of as a Pearl Flip. In December the Style accounted for 1.1% of Pixelated downloads, and 0.2% of downloads for the Hockey Scores application.
The good news is that it looks as if RIM does not intend to carry on with this unsuccessful form factor. Leaks of RIM’s plans by BGR and CrackBerry in the last few weeks included a variety of devices, but nothing that could be considered to be the next version of the Pearl. As a developer this is now a screen resolution that is not worth spending time supporting for most new applications.
The Graphics class is the heart of the paint() method for BlackBerry Java applications. However, occasionally a common action such as drawing a thick curved line, is more complicated then it should be. If having a thickness of a single pixel is acceptable, you can use the following code.
However, trying to give this line any thickness complicates things a lot. Using the normal work around of placing a number of lines next to each other works great for the straight segments, but falls apart on the curve, where the layout is less predictable. As a result, the best way to draw a thick curve is to use the drawFilledPath() method, and essentially draw and fill a shape.
The following code draws the same line/curve/line segment as the code above, but gives it a thickness of five pixels.
The Hockey Scores application has been updated to version 2.3 adding keyboard shortcuts, and backups via BlackBerry Desktop Manger among other enhancements.
Keyboard Shortcuts
The Hockey Scores application now supports keyboard shortcuts on all full-qwerty devices. Pressing ‘e’ or ‘enter’ expands the currently selected game to show details. Pressing the ‘n’ key moves the selection to the next game, while ‘p’ moves the selection to the previous game.
Today, 10,000 Farkle is celebrating its birthday, after being first released one year ago. In the past year Farkle has gone on to be our second most successful game, and will see an update to version 1.3 in the near future.
Last week Boy Genius Report leaked images and specifications for most of the BlackBerry devices that will be released in the next half year or so. One new piece of hardware included on each of them is a magnetometer, better known as a digital compass. Given that the iPhone has had a magnetometer for a while now it is not all the surprising that RIM felt the need to eventually add it on their devices. That said this is a pretty useless addition of hardware.
In a year and half of the iPhone having a digital compass only two uses have been found for it. The first is to point North. The second is for augmented reality. Personally I have a good sense of direction and therefore no need to use a compass to know which direction is North. Augmented reality is the use that people get more excited about, but that is pretty useless as well.
First of all augmented reality is very cool. It is awesome that the technology exists to do this. However in the end it is nothing more then a tech demo. So while it is impressive that you can do this, it is not useful that you can do this.
The leak also indicates that the next generation of BlackBerrys will come with hardware for NFC (near field communication). NFC is the technology to actually get excited about.
Over the past few months the reviews on BlackBerry AppWorld have been overwhelmed by people leaving their BBM PIN’s instead of actual relevant reviews. The image to the right (full size) shows a few recent reviews of the puzzle game Pixelated. Only one of these reviewers does not post their BBM PIN, and despite the generally high ratings, most spend very little text actually reviewing the game.
Furthermore, publicly posting your PIN is just asking for trouble. The 24 year old girl pleading for perverts not to send her nude pictures is going to be disappointed. She could have saved herself (and the people who have to read through these reviews) a lot of effort by simply not posting her BBM PIN at all.
These types of reviews do not help out somebody actually trying to use them for their intended purpose of learning what other people think of the game. In this case the application is free, so they can simply download it with no risk, but these BBM PIN reviews are starting to become common in paid applications as well.
Given how out of control the situation is, I propose that RIM needs to step up and automatically deny any AppWorld review that contains a BBM PIN, in the same manner that they are already blocking reviews containing select curse words. It would be a drastic step, but the situation needs to be taken under control.
The above chart shows BlackBerry OS usage since April 2010. Note that usage of OS 5.0 or higher has increased from 59.6% to 77.7% in the past 8 months. Also both OS 4.6.0 and 4.7.x have both decreased from around 5% to almost nothing. Usage of OS 6 meanwhile remains relatively low, but has seen larger growth in the past month (partially due to the release of the 9780).
In many ways the QNX OS is a risk for RIM, because it has no existing applications, and must attract developers so that it can offer a variety of applications at launch. In order to make sure that the BlackBerry PlayBook launches as a success, RIM has done their best to attract a variety of developers to the platform. Best I can tell, they have done a good job doing this.
Besides those developers who have traditionally supported BlackBerry, there is also significant interest from the Adobe community. There are a surprising number of developers who are interested in the PlayBook, who have no history at all with developing for BlackBerry, or working with BlackBerry AppWorld. These represent new additions to the BlackBerry ecosystem who had beforehand ignored RIM.
While it is still to early to tell if RIM has attracted enough developers to offer a large number of applications at launch, at the very least they have succeeded in getting a variety of developers interested in the BlackBerry PlayBook.
Put simply, as a micro-kernel based OS, QNX is ideally suited for a mobile environment. Add that to the devices lack of GSM/EVDO/CDMA radios, its low heat design, and RIM’s excellent history of battery longevity, there is no reason at all to be concerned.
Instead of looking at upgrade rates to OS 5, which are mostly unchanged from last month, here is a look at the percent of users who had upgraded to OS 6 by December.
Device
% at OS 6
9300
1.0%
9330
1.0%
9650
2.0%
9700
2.1%
In short, almost nobody. What this is really telling us is the percentage of users making use of leaked operating systems (which is actually a bit higher then I would have guessed). RIM still needs to push OS 6 to these devices, and give these users the new features that they deserve. It has been five months since I first saw a Bold 9700 running OS 6, so the percent who have upgraded by now should be closer to 80% then 2%.
The Hockey Scores application does not support OS 4.5 with most of this percentage being absorbed by OS 4.6.x instead. The other values of 1.7% for OS 4.7.X and 75.5% for OS 5.0 and higher are extremely close to the numbers the RIM published.
The additional statistic that can be seen here, that is not shown in RIM’s numbers is the breakdown of OS6 and OS5 devices. OS 6 is currently on about 1 in 3 devices running OS 5 or higher, and about a quarter of devices over all. Given that these numbers are already a bit dated, and RIM’s push of OS6 on in market devices has been slow, it is reasonable to believe that the OS 6 adoption numbers have the potential to be much better. It is reasonable to assume, that OS 6 will be on half the devices on the market within a month of it being pushed on current devices and the 93xx by all carriers.
The charts show that downloads on devices running an OS pre-4.5 is non-existent, and explains why even RIM choose to stop supporting these with version 2.0 of AppWorld. Version 4.5 itself has little use, consisting of just 4% of free applications, and 3% of paid applications. Most of these users are running the once popular BlackBerry Curve 8330, which has finally fallen out of favor, and consists of too many people who still haven’t downloaded AppWorld. These low numbers help confirm the decision to not support OS 4.5 for any of our applications.
OS 4.6.x remains fairly popular mostly due to the Curve 8520 which continued to ship with a default OS of 4.6.1 even well after OS 5.0 was released. Now that the 8520 has been replaced by the 9300 this number will continue to fall. The use of OS 4.7.x is almost non-existent, which follows what we have seen with OS 5.0 upgrade rates with the Storm 1 and the Tour seeing the vast majority of users upgrade to OS 5.0, which as I pointed out in early November makes supporting a minimum OS of 5.0 very acceptable for touchscreen devices.
With 75% of users of free applications and 86% of users of paid applications on OS 5.0 or higher, this level of support is quickly becoming good enough. Our two applications requiring a minimum of OS 5.0 are Twinkle and Liar’s Dice, both which are doing well (even if OS 5.0 wasn’t as universal supported during the mid-summer when Twinkle was first launched).
The one thing that is not shown on these charts is the use of OS 6 (which is instead bundled with OS 5 as OS 5+). While it is still too early to be launching applications that require a minimum OS of 6.0 it feels too much like this is just RIM trying to cover up their embarrassingly slow rollout of the update to existing devices.
