Oofa. Today was considerably more upbeat than yesterday – in fact, tomorrow seems more like a home stretch rather than something to be excited about. In the morning, just before the keynote address, we all had a few ideas about what was coming. The BlackBerry Developer Store was more or less a given, but unless you were really into the development scene, the rest of the announcements were largely a mystery. Of course we were secretly holding out for free devices, like little girls wanting ponies for Christmas, but hey, that was more a pipe dream than anything else. Big ups to RIM for delivering.
Catching up on the announcements hammered into us from the keynote took the better part of the morning, but it certainly gave us that big juicy injection of news that us bloggers were so very desperately thirsty for yesterday.
Now, the biggest of these announcements was clearly the BlackBerry Application Center, telegraphed as it may have been beforehand. While RIM’s VP was adamant that the conference had nothing to do with Apple or Google cozying up to mobile developers, it might be harder to make the same statement about the BlackBerry Application Center and Storefront. Just to clear things up about the difference: one will be carrier powered, and really just a place for them to amalgamate all of the download links that they already litter the homescreen with preloads already, while the Application Center will be more of an entire database of the software available for your device. Of course this is will be starting with the Storm, but I’m really curious about seeing it on older device which already have a big uptake. I guess that will depend on when OS 4.7 will be re-jiggered for those old-fogey devices with real keypads.
If you had the sheer ocular fortitude to make it through the keynote liveblog, you would have heard about everybody getting a free device. Yep, that’s me first in line, enjoying an Official BlackBerry® Slurpee, which were, for the record, delicious. How long was the wait, you ask?
