Well, this is a bit surprising. Research In Motion, which isn’t exactly doing well at this point, has just launched version 7.0 of the BlackBerry OS. Curiously enough, this release has nothing to do with the QNX-based operating system of the PlayBook.
BlackBerry OS 7.0 comes as part of two new phones announced by Research In Motion, namely the BlackBerry 9900 and 9930, which are classic-style BlackBerry devices (complete with keyboard), but this time with a touch screen. They also sport a 1.2Ghz processor, support for NFC, and something RIM calls a Liquid Graphics touch screen. This screen has a 640×480 resolution on a 2.8″ diagonal – so an impressive 287ppi. It also does HD video.
As for BlackBerry OS 7.0, it’s not, as you may expect, the phone version of the PlayBook operating system – instead, it is an evolution of the ‘old’ BlackBerry OS 6.0, and comes with an improved browser, which has a new JIT-compiler for JavaScript. There’s apparently also a software side to the Liquid Graphics thing, as RIM mentions graphics performance – both for games as well as the user interface – has improved as well thanks to the technology. I’m guessing they either worked on or replaced the graphics stack in the BB OS.
The bad news for existing BlackBerry users – whose numbers are rising visibly here in The Netherlands due to aggressive advertising – is that BlackBerry OS 7.0 is not compatible with current devices. This means that the only way to get it is to buy a new BlackBerry 9900 or 9930.
While it’s of course great that RIM is still toiling away on the BlackBerry operating system, the lack of compatibility with existing devices (or at least some of them) puzzles me. They’re working on bringing the QNX-based PlayBook operating system to regular smartphones, yet they expect BlackBerry owners to buy a completely new device for a release of an operating system which is going to be a dead end soon? And what about developers? They’re expected to code for the new capabilities of BB OS 7.0, knowing it’s a dead end?
It all seems a bit curious to me – the hardware looks damn impressive here, but is a rather limited update, which is only available on new devices, really enough to stop the overall exodus of BB users?
…for which they haven’t written an e-mail or calendar client yet, which is why it’s relegated to a knockoff placeholder and they couldn’t dream of shipping it on an actual product.
FTA:
I know thanks to Apple people expect literally everything that presents an image to respond to touch, but come on, 2.8″? How much weight, energy, and monetary cost is associated with adding one extra giant backlit button to the thing?
touch screens are required these days. It seems like if a phone doesn’t have multi-touc/pinch to zoom people won’t even look at it. I don’t fully understand it but that seems to be the way people think. You can see countless of posts about “omg! no multi-touch!” on phones just a couple of years ago.
I personally find this rather annoying. I have an N900 with a resistive screen and one of my friends was like “Guess what I have that you don’t? Multi-touch!” But upon questioning him, he couldn’t honestly say that he used it for anything other than the pinch-to-zoom feature. I have dedicated buttons for that, or I can make a spiral gesture and do it. When you’ve just got a screen capacitive multi-touch can be more of a hassle than it’s worth.
as long as my cell phone doesn’t have a rotary interface I’m pretty happy with it. People are just spoiled these days…
Now to create an app to emulate a dialer…
Then I could be both retro & modern
Just one of the many:
https://market.android.com/details?id=com.wagado.old_phone&feature=s…
I use multitouch for getting high scores in fruit ninja. It also prevents weird behaviour when you type too fast, and the single touch intercace tries to resolve two places being touched at once.
bah…that’s what a physical keyboard is for.
yup, I have a winmo phone with a resistive screen and haven’t needed mulitouch for anything. The spiral-to-zoom feature is quite nice actually. Get to zoom in using only one hand. No need to hold phone with one hand while pinching with the other.
Edited 2011-05-03 17:48 UTC
Seems odd to me too – touch screen uggh – touch the screen with your sticky mits and I’ll break your fingers.
Not to mention how disgusting they get when you’ve been holding them up to your face for a few minutes. Yuck, who’s bright idea was that anyway?
The problem with all these touch screens is that they need far more attention to use than their physical counterparts.
I predict someone will invent an interactive bump surface, using a matrix of tiny electromagnets to elevate portions of the screen to mimic physical buttons/textures to provide enhanced tactile feedback.
Nice idea! But you’ve just ruined any chance of Apple, HTC, Samsung and others of their ilk to ever file a valid patent for that invention… Given the litigation atmosphere they’ve been basking in lately, you deserve a medal, though I couldn’t do more than a +1.
Too late ! Apple already applied for a patent about this
(I mean really, they did, saw it in the news months ago)
Edited 2011-05-03 17:20 UTC
What you’re suggesting relates closely to work on refreshable Braille being done by http://www.bristolbrailletechnology.com and http://www.tactilerevolution.com.
Take a look if that sort of thing interests you.