BlackBerry DevConAsia 2011
The BigTinCan team was fortunate to be able to attend this exciting event in Bali Indonesia. The first time DevCon has been held in Asia. There were four of our team at the event and we all managed to make the most of the sessions and were able to get into the middle of the happenings on BlackBerry.
The keynote on the first day was great, and we tried our first "tweetstream" focusing on the new announcements made at the keynote - and I can say that the experience of having to keep typing and telling people the updates was something really compelling almost addictive.
Big news at the event was the announcement of BlackBerry OS 6.1 APIs including geofencing tools (neat) and lots of new developments on WebWorks - with the announcement of WebWorks coming to the BlackBerry Playbook tablet.
The Playbook is an exciting device, however there has been a question in the mind of many developers about how they were going to get their arms around developing in AIR and Flash, when many developers come from a Java or C based development environment.
Adding WebWorks on the Playbook is taking things more down the path of the kind of development that many in the community are comfortable with.
Using the Playbook
DevCon gave us the first opportunity to use the Playbook and we can say that it certainly is something compelling. The use of the bezel to control the device was refreshing - interestingly on the first day of DevCon, there was a leaked story on BGR that Apple was considering removing its "button" with the view to move to multi touch gestures to replace its use on iPad and iPhone.
Until we get a device its hard to know how "complete" the Playbook is - we couldn't find a "settings" panel on the demo unit we used to see how much is implemented yet - and how it will perform in the real world- were all those battery issue rumors true? We weren't able to get answers to those questions t DevCon, but we are planning on submitting apps to AppWorld for Playbook and hope to be able to get answers as soon as we get units to use.
Sessions
It was good for our team to be able to catch up with the latest, and great to see so many Canadian presenters - RIM made a big commitment to the event. Hands on labs were especially good.
Whats Next
RIM certainly seems committed to Asia - even to the point of making changes in how their systems work for counties like Indonesia where the government is requesting access to BIS - but probably these changes are vital for RIM in this ever growing market - the opportunity for tens of millions of more unit sales here is real and we hope to be there with RIM as they execute on this opportunity.
For BigTinCan its back to Sydney to work on some more exciting projects. Looking forward to a great 2011.
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