Research in Motion launched their newest BlackBerry operating system (version 6.0) with the release of the BlackBerry Torch 9800 on August 12th. At the time they promised that the OS update was coming soon to some other devices such as the BlackBerry Bold 9700 and 9650. However, now well over a full month past the release of the Torch there has still been no release of OS6 for any other devices. The new webkit browser was showed off on the 9700 over 7 months ago, there is really no reason not to have these releases ready to go.

Instead we have plenty of BlackBerrys that are “OS6 ready”, but only actually have OS6 on a single device, that is currently only available in a single country, from a single carrier. The Torch is selling well enough, but is still a small segment of the market for the reason mentioned above. As a result there are very few devices that currently support OS6.

The end result is that as a developer all of the new features and APIs that OS6 offers will go unused. There are alot of cool options in the new operating system, but if the vast majority of users are unable to use them, then it is impossible to justify spending time learning and developing for OS6. Features that a super majority of users can not use is not a good reason to delay the launch of an new release.

It is not that I don’t want to offer these new options, it is that I need the market share in order to do so. All RIM needs to push out an update to the 9700, 9650, and 93xx devices and that would be a significant amount of users. Until then the advantages of OS6 will not be seen, even by those that already have the Torch.

Traditionally the BlackBerry is seen as a more serious business device, while games are seen more as a strength of the iPhone. However the most recent app store report from Distimo actually points to game companies targeting the BlackBerry first.

In a section showing the application count of the top five cross platform publishers three (Gameloft, Electronic Arts, and Glu) all showed more applications available for BlackBerry then any other platform. A fourth (Handmark) showed BlackBerry even with iPhone and well ahead of Android. Perhaps BlackBerry is not quite the games wasteland that it is often thought to be.

Regardless with Pixelated and 10,000 Farkle both doing well, BlackBerry has proven to be a reliable gaming platform for Ebscer. So much so that a third game is on the way…

It is now a few months after the release of the new BlackBerry Pearl (9100 and 9105) but almost no one is buying this model. There are plenty of reasons for this, the primary one being the fact that it has been picked up by none of the major US carriers. But even more so the reviews for the phone while positive, always carried the hint that the Pearl was the perfect phone for “someone else”, and that they were obviously not going to give up their Bold for it. As such the Pearl is almost unused. Pixelated was one of the first applications to support the Pearl, but use of the Pearl has remained minimal. A look at downloads from late August show the Pearl still not doing as well as obscure models such as the 8350i and the GSM version of the Storm1. It is also not doing as well as recently launched models such as the 9800 and 9300. At this point there looks to be little reason for RIM to continue working on this line, and we may have already come to the end of this form factor’s life.

Despite a number of news reports claiming that sales of the BlackBerry Torch 9800 being “tepid” or “disappointing” the actual numbers show sales to be better than expected. Just because the Torch didn’t get an iPhone style roll out (which has never been RIM’s style), doesn’t mean that the Torch hasn’t had an excellent first week.

One of the advantages of developing one of BlackBerry’s most popular games is that you get a large enough sample size of user data to get a good idea of trends are happening in the BlackBerry ecosystem. So far the early signs show that the BlackBerry Torch is almost 12 times more popular then the Bold 9650 was during its first week on Verizon.

While the raw numbers are in fact higher, this is unimportant as there are a large number of factors going into that such a carrier and the popularity of the application at the given time. In order to adjust for this the Torch 9800 on was normalized against the 9700 on AT&T, and the Bold 9650 was normalized against the 9630 on Verizon. This showed the opening week for the Torch to be 11.9 times better the opening week for the 9650 was a few months ago. The Torch is off to a strong start, and will only continue to do so when it is rolled out across the Canadian carriers.