The conference kicked off with a general session to update developers on the latest developments around the BlackBerry platforms, followed by multi-tracked technical, practical and insight sessions that zero into the details.
BlackBerry DevCon Asia in Singapore Suntec from 7-8 December, 2011.
The break-out sessions were helmed by specialists from Research In Motion (RIM) and its partners and delved into wide ranging topics from technical issues to commercial and monetizing approaches.
Gregory Wade, Regional Managing Director, East Asia, RIM
Delivering the keynote address was Gregory Wade, Regional Managing Director, East Asia, RIM.
He revealed there were more than 1,000 registrants for the DevCon Asia event in Singapore.
Wade quoted a GfK report that for the first half of 2011, BlackBerry was the number one smartphone in multiple countries in Asia, including Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines.
He said that more than 3 million BlackBerry fans were engaged on social media channels in Asia.
Alec Saunders then updated developers of BlackBerry Jam – RIM’s initiative to provide a one-stop-shop for all BlackBerry developers to assess a wide array of developer resources.
Alec Saunders, VP, Developer Relations & Ecosystems Development, RIM
Saunders is the VP, Developer Relations & Ecosystems Development at RIM.
The initiative was announced at the BlackBerry DevCon Americas in October. Since then, a BlackBerry Jam communities have sprung up all over the world linking experts, partners and developers for all to be more successful on the BlackBerry platform.
George Staikos then delved into the new BlackBerry platform – previously named BBX but now renamed to BB10. Staikos is the VP, Web Technologies at RIM.
BlackBerry Jam Communities around the world
He also described the two choices of runtime environments available for developers. The Native runtime environment was for “spectacular” performance whereas HTML5 will enable the dream of “write once deploy everywhere”.
RIM will return DevCon Asia to Thailand in the future.
Whilst the native environment will serve as the bridge between POSIX based systems and BlackBerry 10 and allow rapid porting of native applications, HTML5 is the mass application platform for the future.
The cross-platform, cross-device HTML5 can serve as the bridge between BlackBerry 6, BlackBerry 7 and BlackBerry 10 and is the obvious choice for modern application development.
BlackBerry is therefore fully committed to HTML5.
