Last summer when RIM announced that the release of BlackBerry 10 was going to be pushed back to early 2013, a lot was made of the fact that RIM was going to miss the Christmas season. Yet, I fail to see why this would be a big deal. Yes, the three month delay will hurt BlackBerry, but the fact that the three months happen to include Christmas is largely irrelevant. The set back is not more significant than any other three month period would have been.

The reason for this is that BlackBerrys have never been all that popular as Christmas gifts. Last year, I looked at the myth of the Christmas day sales spike and found that app downloads and sales on the days surrounding Christmas were no different than any other days that month.

Downloads of the free game Pixelated in December 2010 & 2011

Intuitively this makes sense as most people are unlikely to give a gift that also requires a two-year contract. In fact I think it is safe to assume that most of the mobile devices given as gifts this year will be wi-fi only devices, or pre-paid phones. BlackBerry 10 would not be making much of an impact on the pre-paid market either way, as the new devices would be priced a bit out of this market for the first few months anyhow.

Furthermore, RIM has never seen a spike in sales in the quarter that contains Christmas. The following chart shows the number of BlackBerry phones (excluding PlayBooks) that RIM has sold for the past five years in the quarter containing Christmas, the quarter before Christmas, and the quarter after Christmas. Of these five years, only in one of them did the Christmas quarter result in more devices shipped then both of the quarters surrounding it.

Devices shipped in millions. Years correspond to RIM’s fiscal years which are stupid and off by 300+ days from reality

In short, while pushing back the release of BlackBerry 10 isn’t good news, the fact that BlackBerry 10 was pushed to the other side of Christmas is not that big of a deal.

At this time last year, I began experimenting with releasing some of my applications on non-BlackBerry platforms. I now have games available to be downloaded from the Nook Bookstore, Google Play, the Amazon App Store, the Windows Phone Marketplace, and the Windows 8 Store. While making my apps accessible from these stores has resulted in some success, it is hard to say that supporting these additional platforms has been the best use of my time. Twelve months later, BlackBerry AppWorld still brings in more revenue then all of the other stores combined.

During this past summer BlackBerry was stuck in an odd in-between state where BlackBerry 7 was beginning to be phased out, and BlackBerry 10 was still a ways off. With this gap in place it made sense to explore alternative platforms, and to prepare some apps for the launch of Windows 8. However, now that the launch of BlackBerry 10 is just 54 days away, it is time to concentrate on the upcoming OS.

With less then two months to go until launch (and Christmas in the middle of that time frame), there is no compelling reason to look at the other platforms. For the near future, I will going back to BlackBerry-only development. Hopefully this will allow me to offer a solid selection of BlackBerry 10 apps on day one.

As was expected, there was not too much that was new in the announcements at BlackBerry Jam Asia. The only real news was the reveal of the DevAlpha C with a full keyboard. Besides that it was just the steady march of progress as the promised updates were released for the DevAlpha, and the SDKs. My thoughts on the updates to the DevAlpha are below…

New Version of AppWorld

The DevAlpha version of AppWorld (now renamed to just BlackBerry World) now allows for payments (and in-app payments) to take place. Also new in BlackBerry World are Trending, and Top Grossing lists. I am particularly happy to see a Top Grossing list as it has a tendency to show off apps that use in-app purchases like Xploding Boxes.

Blue headers

Any Cascades apps that make use of headers or alert dialogs, now see them in a garish blue color. To me it comes across as iOS-style ugly, and reinforces my decision to just create my own headers anyhow. I much prefer the more flat industrial look that Cascades had when first released and had less rounded corners and no gradients.

New Homescreen icons

BlackBerry has done away with the boxed-in icons that they were using in the last release, and while the new icons feel slightly small it is most likely due to the need to design for screens that are only 720px wide. This change goes back to giving developers more freedom in their icon design, and I may un-boxify some of my icons.

Default font sizes are larger

I don’t really have any thoughts on this, but it is noticeable.

Last year before BlackBerry DevCon I wrote my expectations for the event. For the most part, it turned out that my expectations were wrong. Still, I figured that I would give it another go this year.

Expectations

First off all, I expect the focus to be squarely on BlackBerry 10, with no time at all spent on the current BlackBerry 7 devices, and even the PlayBook being most ignored.

I think that RIM will show off their first two BlackBerry 10 phones. Even if a hands-on is not available, I think that RIM will be able to show off final renderings for the devices, and set expectations. Some may worry about an osborne effect, but that ship has already sailed.

I also expect RIM to release some version of BBM for the DevAlpha, as the roadmap indicates that the BBM APIs will be available.

Hopes

I would love it if RIM would release a simulator for every BlackBerry 10 screen size that they plan on releasing. While the first phone will match the 768×1280 of the DevAlpha, it would be nice if there were simulators at 720×720, 720×1280, and 600×1024 as well. Most apps will be designed to work at all orientations, but it would be nice if there was an easy way to test this.

Most of all, I hope to be surprised. That RIM still has something up their sleeve that I don’t know about. Something that hasn’t been endlessly leaked on every blog. RIM did a good job with this at BlackBerry World in the spring, hopefully they can do it again.

A few months ago I wrote about about RIM’s $10,000 gurantee on BlackBerry 10 apps at BerryReview. Since then RIM has released some more details about the program, and for the most part my initial assumptions were more or less correct. Yet as the launch of BlackBerry 10 gets closer, the existence of this offer seems less relevant.

Due to the target platforms of the program (requiring apps to be written in Cascades, C/C++, or HTML5), the details of the program (requiring integration of BBM, the Invocation framework, and legal disclaimers), and the limiting of the program to a single app per developer, it seems highly likely that none of this will qualify me to receive an extra payout. My established apps such as Pixelated and Xploding Boxes will easily sell over $10,000 in the first year and exclude me from any incentive to jump through the loop holes specifically for the sake of this program. Of course there are plenty of other reasons why integrating with services like BBM are a good idea, but this offer does not affect them. As such the best approach going forwards is probably to just ignore the fact that the $10k gurantee exists at all.

Of course this is kindof the point. The idea was never to offer prize money or a payout, but instead to simply offer some insurance on taking a risk on the new platform. RIM is guarantee that high quality apps will sell, and assuming that this is correct, then RIM will not have to pay anything out anyhow.

The main target of this offer appears to be developers of existing C/C++ and HTML apps on other platforms. By giving them a minimum revenue gurantee, it makes it much easier for them to justify the time and risk in porting over their apps to BlackBerry10. For those of us who have been selling apps on BlackBerry for a while now, we already know that we can expect to see sales, and as such this offer does not add much to the decision process, and can mostly just be ignored.

For more opinions on this program from some of the top BlackBerry developers see this post on the developer forums.