RIM On The Playbook's Variety Of Development Choices

Jim Tobin, SVP of the Software, Services & Enterprise Markets business unit at Research In Motion1 tries to justify the Blackberry Playbook’s recent announcement that it will be supported Android apps and other technologies in the future.

To recap, these are the supported platforms you can use to develop applications for the Playbook:

  1. Adobe Flash/Air
  2. RIM’s own WebWorks SDK for web app development
  3. Coming this summer: classic Blackberry Java apps via an application layer
  4. Coming this summer: Android via an application layer
  5. Coming sometime in the future. No really we promise: native C/C++ support

Only a Linux distribution can rival the Playbook in the number of toolkits and SDKs it ships with. I can’t imagine how anyone is going to enjoy using this thing.

  1. I couldn’t resist posting his full title.↩

Posted on April 07, 2011