With the announcement of the new BlackBerry® Torch™ 9800 smartphone today, I wanted to provide an overview of the device from the perspective of the developer, in order to help developers understand what opportunities this new smartphone opens up.

The BlackBerry Torch 9800 smartphone is the first to support BlackBerry® 6, which has been previewed recently on the Inside BlackBerry Blog. It opens up new opportunities for our developer community, from enhanced Java® applications to game-changing web applications to BlackBerry® Widgets using HTML5 and CSS3.

For Java developers, you can check out our BlackBerry 6 developer page for more information on the new APIs and to download the new tools needed to get started. Developers will also be able to download the latest BlackBerry Java SDK v6.0 via the Eclipse® update site.

Web and BlackBerry® Widget developers can also visit the BlackBerry 6 developer page for more information on the new capabilities. All of the existing web development tools on BlackBerry® smartphones will work with BlackBerry 6, but you will want to download the latest simulator to check out your new HTML5 content.

To coincide with the major enhancements to the BlackBerry® Browser in BlackBerry 6 with the inclusion of the new WebKit rendering engine, we have also modified the User Agent header for the browser to better reflect the type of web content supported by our browser. To ensure that your mobile and desktop websites are providing the best possible content and experience for our users, developers should modify their websites to detect this new User Agent header:

Mozilla/5.0 (BlackBerry; U; BlackBerry 9800; en) AppleWebKit/534.1+
(KHTML, Like Gecko) Version/6.0.0.141 Mobile Safari/534.1+

BlackBerry Torch – A Developer’s Perspective

From a developer’s perspective, here is what you need to know about the new BlackBerry Torch 9800 smartphone.

• Supports GSM/GPRS/EDGE/HSDPA networks worldwide providing 3G cellular connectivity around the world
• 480 x 360 screen resolution

• 5.0 MP Camera with Auto Focus, Scene Modes support and video recording

• Location Support through the Geolocation Service and Autonomous GPS

• Wi-Fi® Support – 802.11n

• 4 GB of onboard memory, with microSD support for up to 32GB (for multimedia, etc.); 512MB flash memory (Application Space)

• The first BlackBerry smartphone with a physical keyboard and touch screen!

• Touch screen and trackpad: Touch screen does not utilize SurePress™ – to accommodate in-market apps supporting SurePress, a TouchEvent.DOWN event will also generate TouchEvent.CLICK and TouchEvent.UNCLICK events. So what would’ve previously been a DOWN / UP sequence on previous BlackBerry smartphones supporting touch now results in a DOWN / CLICK / UNCLICK / UP sequence, where the CLICK and UNCLICK events are generated following the DOWN event.

Get started now by checking out developer pages for BlackBerry 6!

With the exciting news of the upcoming BlackBerry® 6 release, we wanted to make sure that everyone had a chance to preview the latest WebKit rendering engine with their BlackBerry Widgets leading up to the availability of the BlackBerry® Torch™ 9800 smartphone. To do this, we are making available an early patch for the BlackBerry Widget SDK that will allow you to build your widgets so that they are both compatible with BlackBerry Device Software v5.0 and the new BlackBerry 6.

We are all very excited about the power that the new WebKit engine brings to the BlackBerry platform, and with such a major change, there were changes in the inner workings of our Widget packaging that needed to be taken into account. We also wanted to make sure that we provided developers with a mechanism so that they didn’t have to manage different sets of code to target both v5.0 and BlackBerry 6 devices.

This early patch synchronizes the two versions to the point where you don’t have to worry about it. This means is that in order to have your BlackBerry Widget run the best on both v5.0 and BlackBerry 6, you will want to apply this patch and rebuild your Widget using the Widget SDK. We will also be releasing a full upgrade of the BlackBerry Widget SDK and the BlackBerry Web Plug-ins for Eclipse® and Visual Studio® shortly.

NOTE: This patch is only for the standalone version of the BlackBerry Widget SDK and will not work with the existing versions of the BlackBerry Web Plug-in v2.0.

Details on how to acquire the BlackBerry 6 Widget SDK patch and how to apply it can be found in the following Developer Resource Center article.

What about the compatibility between Gears and HTML5?

RIM® is looking to strongly support the HTML5 standard moving forward. As such, BlackBerry 6 no longer supports Gears functionality since that same functionality is now found in HTML5 standard.

To ease the work involved in supporting two code lines for BlackBerry Device Software v5.0 and BlackBerry 6, we have created a JavaScript toolkit that you can load into your BlackBerry Widget to provide HTML5 capabilities in Widgets running on 5.0 device software.

The JavaScript toolkit provides the following HTML5 interfaces as a simple layer over top of the Gears capabilities currently available in 5.0:

- Geolocation
o Position
o PositionOptions
o PositionError
o Coordinates

- Database
o SQLTransaction
o SQLResultSet
o SQLResultSetRowList
o SQLError

- Worker

The toolkit is smart enough to know if it needs to be loaded or not, so when a page with the toolkit is loaded in the WebKit browser on BlackBerry 6, it doesn’t add these interfaces since they already exist natively. This toolkit will allow you to construct your code so that it is standards compliant and it will work on both operating systems with a single source base.

The details of how to use and retrieve this HTML5 JavaScript toolkit can be found in the same Resource Center Article which has the details on the BlackBerry Widget SDK patch for BlackBerry 6. Check it out, then come back and let us know what you think!