One of the gems for the BlackBerry (NSDQ: RIMM) Developer Conference that slipped through the cracks was the announcement of Urbanspoon for BlackBerry. You might recognize the app for its prominence in iPhone ads – it’s the one where you shake your phone to get suggested restaurants within your area based on GPS location. You can set criteria for cuisine, budget, and area, if you’re feeling picky. The Storm retains the accelerometer support, so you can shake and eat to your heart’s content. To turn the crank and spin the foodie slot machine, check out UrbanSpoon’s BlackBerry page. The iPhone version, as ever, is available from iTunes here.

BBDC was unexpectedly busy – hear how the devs feel about it all!

If you haven’t been following, the 2009 BlackBerry Developer Conference was the source of a lot of big announcements, like OpenGL support enabling some rich 3D graphics, an Adobe partnership that cements Flash on BlackBerry, and a long-overdue LinkedIn app. This episode of The Signal focuses a lot on themes, as we have the fine folks from BlackBerry Theme Park and themes4bb giving us our take on the new Theme Builder Studio. The winner of the BlackBerry (NSDQ: RIMM) (NSDQ: RIMM) Partner’s Fund challenge, James Shannon from DevelopIQ, gives us some feedback from the app developer side, and how all of the various announcements impact the 7digital music store. No conference is complete without hooking up with some fellow bloggers – Ronen Halevy from BerryReview and Kevin Michaluk from CrackBerry weigh in on the show overall, and what RIM’s future with developers is looking like.

At points it’s a little technical, but if you’re into BlackBerry, development, or user interface stuff, this is the podcast for you. Hit the jump!

Sorry about the audio quality,  it was tricky finding a quiet spot to record.

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The BlackBerry (NSDQ: RIMM) App World got some love at the Developer Conference keynote, with the announced inclusion of web-based widgets and themes. We had heard themes were coming down the pipe, and the widget SDK has been out there for a little over a month, but combined with the show’s focus on the new theme builder tools and OS 5.0, the devs here should feel good about diving right in to these new kinds of App World content.

BlackBerry widgets have generated a lot of talk here at BBDC, but there’s still a lot of contention about the name; most people think of tiny desktop applications, or Android home screen items, and that’s really not what BlackBerry widgets are like at all. It’s probably better to think of them as RIM’s answer to webOS – it essentially opens up the platform to those who are interested or simply more comfortable coding in web languages like CSS, HTML and XML. The presence of widgets in App World is going to be seamless, since they won’t be functionally different than the standard Java applications folks normally load up onto a BlackBerry.

As for themes, the new tools should give theme developers a little bit of extra fighting juice in a new, unified, and potentially competitive theme market. The internal testing process will likely be a little different, but I’ve been told it will be just as robust as that for apps and the submitting will be just as open to everyone.

Finally, carrier billing is something folks have been asking for, since PayPal has been the sole payment option since App World’s launch in the spring. With carrier billing, folks would just end up seeing all App World purchases right on their monthly wireless bill. Working directly with credit and debit cards would be sweet in the long run, but this is a good step in the right direction. In-app transactions will provide an added revenue stream for developers, but end-users need options on the payment front too. It’ll be interesting to see which carriers sign on for this kind of billing, and how long it takes to roll out internationally.

If you’ve got either a theme or widget that you want to get into App World, you can get submitting right now. Carrier billing won’t be around until next year, though.

Need For Speed played the poster boy role for RIM’s OpenGL ES announcement, but they’re definitely not the only ones who are excited about the new options for developers.  Here’s a quick demo of Concrete Software’s PBA Bowling, coming to the BlackBerry (NSDQ: RIMM) Storm2. Sega also said that they have started work on getting their extremely successful Super Monkey Ball franchise onto the Storm2. The OpenGL support is limited to certain hardware constraints, so right now only the Storm2 and Curve 8530 (oddly enough) will support the enhanced graphical capabilities. It’s worth noting that though 3D is the big thing, OpenGL can also do some good work on the 2D front. Check out the earlier announcement from the BlackBerry Developer Conference for more info.

There’s no denying that the overall BlackBerry (NSDQ: RIMM) UI feels a bit old, but today at the BlackBerry Developer Conference, RIM took some big steps to freshen up. A new Theme Studio and will allow developers to really go to town, including options for screen transitions, animations, and all of the usual tools needed to put a theme together. The Studio includes a Theme Builder for the usual font, icon placement, dialog box colouring, etc., and a Composer to create animated graphics. Awhile back in OS 4.5, themes saw a pretty beefy upgrade, and this new tool will equally open up some doors. A bunch of Adobe tools plug right in as well, making it easy to import assets and even preview themes on a device proper attached via USB.

On top of the new theme tool, a new plug-in for Eclipse should make app developers lives easier by opening up a lot of user interface options. All you have to do is drag and drop elements you want (like a carousel, or picture viewer), and you’ll see them all on various BlackBerry devices, in full WYSIWYG glory.

For a closer look at the Theme Studio, you can get downloading over here, and the new GUI plug-in will be available mid-2010.

It’s about time. At yesterday’s keynote, RIM announced a LinkedIn application for BlackBerry (NSDQ: RIMM), joining Facebook and MySpace as some of the platform’s pillars social networking pillars. BlackBerry was built from the ground up for professionals, so LinkedIn really is a perfect fit. All of the expected functionality is there, like notifications in the Messages folder, Address Book and Calendar integration, invitation handling, home screen notifications, and plenty more. Here are a few more screenshots, but you can keep an eye on the LinkedIn blog for more info leading up the public release before the end of the year.

We can’t think of anyone that couldn’t use a personal assistant helping keep track of emails and contacts. It’s too bad a living, breathing personal assistant just isn’t feasible for everyone. That’s where Xobni comes in. Xobni is a super-charged, super-smart address book for your BlackBerry (NSDQ: RIMM). The Xobni for BlackBerry app trawls through your emails and automatically creates contacts for anyone you’ve ever interacted with and assigns a Xobni Rank to each contact, based on your previous email interactions with that person.

We mentioned Xobni previously, but today we had the pleasure of sitting down with Xobni CEO Jeff Bonforte to see for ourselves how Xobni can help manage all your emails and contacts in an intuitive app. The app displays email interaction history for each contact, so you’ll never have to wonder what you last discussed with a particular contact. Xobni even integrates into your email and phone apps, allowing you to pull up the Xobni address book with a flick of the trackball/trackpad.

Check out our hands-on video for a better idea of how Xobni works!

It’s not often that a mobile app for the BlackBerry (NSDQ: RIMM) platform out-plays its iPhone counterpart. But, when it happens, you can be sure it’s going to grab some headlines. Location aware friend-tracker Loopt is grabbing just those kinds of headlines today with a new update that enables background processing and things-to-do suggestions in the BlackBerry app. Loopt for BlackBerry will keep track of your friends even when you’re not actively using the app. In comparison, the iPhone version of the Loopt app, which could be considered the social network’s premier mobile app, doesn’t support background processing (and probably won’t for a good while). Take that, iPhone.

Loopts location-based social network is great for keeping tabs on your friends, but it basically becomes useless when you exit the app on your smartphone. Once the app closes, you’re cut off from your friends’ location updates until you fire up the Loopt app again. This new BlackBerry Loopt app update finally makes it possible to track your friends in real-time and in the background. If your buddy changes locations while you’re sending out an email or making a phone call, Loopt will take note and update its location database.

The update also sports the new Pulse suggestions feature that automatically recommends events and places that might pique your interest. It’ll also give you a quick glance at what your friends are doing at any given moment. And, with coupon support, the latest Loopt for BlackBerry update can automatically determine your location and serve up relevant coupons and discount offers from nearby businesses.

In the end, it all comes back to the fact that the Loopt for BlackBerry now supports background processing, and the iPhone does not. We’re hesitant to admit it, but the iPhone could learn a thing or two from BlackBerry.

Loopt for BlackBerry is free of charge. Get it here.

RIM today announced at their BlackBerry Developers Conference in San Francisco that the BlackBerry (NSDQ: RIMM) OS will soon support OpenGL ES for 3D graphics acceleration. The arrival of 3D graphics support should finally bring the BlackBerry platform out of the dark ages, where BrickBreaker and other 2D games reigned supreme. RIM and EA Mobile took to the BBDC keynote stage to show off the still-in-development “Need For Speed: Shift” 3D game, giving the world a glimpse of what’s to come. The game looked impressive, to say the least, so we figured a hands-on video was in order.

We sat down with EA Mobile and gave the game a solid once-over. Before we continue, we should mention again that Need For Speed: Shift is still in early stage development, and what you see below is actually the first ever playable version of the game. As such, there weren’t too many cars to pick from, and the game had only a single playable track. Still, the accelerometer-based controls were easy to use – they were responsive but not twitchy (like a lot of racing games on the iPhone). In-game audio was impressive and really gave the game a more polished feel than the two weeks worth of development time would have suggested.

EA Mobile promises to have Need for Speed: Shift polished off by the time it hits the BlackBerry App World. By that time the game should support more computer rivals (AI enemies), a drift-turn feature to slide around corners and player-points to upgrade your ride. Check out the video below!

Gaming on BlackBerry (NSDQ: RIMM) has never been what you would call breathtaking – a few low-key casual games here and there and the preloaded Brickbreaker could handle the lion’s share of twitchy boredom. Well, the platform is taking a big jump as OpenGL ES support has gone official and is currently available in the beta BlackBerry JDE we had mentioned earlier.

The in-app purchacing sounded vaguely iPhone OS 3.0, and OpenGL even moreso, but between these multimedia improvements and BlackBerry’s existing expertise in productivity, the whole platform is feeling a lot more balanced. Shown here is Need for Speed, which we’ll have some hands-on footage of shortly, complete with gesture controls for brake and boosting, and accelerometer use for steering. There’s going to be at least one other big name game showing off what OpenGL on BlackBerry can do, and we’ll be sure to check it out.