The infamous Blackberry line of mobile phones from Research In Motion, commonly referred to as the “Crackberry,” is getting a development push from RIM. With the mobile phones industry redefining itself with more features and computing power, RIM wants to ensure that their mobiles can compete on the same playing field.
Application Programming Interfaces (API’s), the heart of the development platform, are essential to allowing third-party developers to create new applications for any given device (the Blackberry in this case).
These API’s have been added to the BlackBerry Java Development Environment, which has since been downloaded by over 125,000 developers. That’s a good start for the new BlackBerry JDE, and should help launch a host of new mapping, GPS, gaming, and media applications. RIM is also planning to release additional API’s, for messaging and 3D graphics, in the near future.
RIM’s push to provide a complete mobile computing platform seems to be off to a good start. You gotta hand it to RIM for their foresight and commitment in opening up the development platform to third-parties. We all know of at least one particular company that could stand to take some notes on this matter (cough…Apple…cough).