Following the announcement of BlackBerry® 7 at the BlackBerry® World™ conference, I’m pleased to announce that the BlackBerry® Java® SDK v7.0 is now available in beta!

This new version of the SDK also comes with simulators for the new BlackBerry® Bold™ 9900 series of smartphones, allowing you to test your applications against the latest and greatest. With the new BlackBerry Bold 9900 smartphone and BlackBerry® Bold™ 9930 smartphone on their way, you will have the tools you need to make sure your apps are running on these smartphones at launch. What’s more, the BlackBerry App World™ storefront is also accepting app submissions for these new devices! You now have the chance to be among the first to have your application submitted and ready for these exciting new products.

The BlackBerry Java Plug-in for Eclipse™ and the BlackBerry Java Development Environment have also both been updated to support the new OS version, featuring an abundance of new APIs. They’re all listed out in great detail in the “New in this Release” section of the Release Notes.

For more information on what developers need to know about BlackBerry 7 and to download the BlackBerry Java SDK v7.0 beta, check out the BlackBerry 7 landing page on BlackBerry Developer Zone.

With the announcement of the new BlackBerry® Bold™ 9900 smartphone and BlackBerry® Bold™ 9930 smartphone at the BlackBerry® World™ conference, I wanted to provide an overview of the devices from the perspective of the developer, in order to help developers understand what opportunities these new smartphones provide.

The BlackBerry Bold 9900 smartphone and the BlackBerry Bold 9930 smartphone are the first BlackBerry® smartphones to support BlackBerry® 7, and also the first BlackBerry smartphones to feature a touch interface on a traditional BlackBerry form factor.

Key features for developers:

• VGA (640 x 480) screen resolution
• 32-bit color (24 bits of color and 8 bits of transparency)
• 1.2 GHz Processor
• 8 GB of onboard memory, with microSD support for up to 32GB
• 4G networks; the 9900 supports HSPA+ connectivity, and the 9930 supports CDMA EV-DO Rev. A and HSPA+ global roaming on GSM/UMTS networks.
• Dedicated 3D OpenGL ES 1.1/2.0 and dedicated 2D OpenVG 1.1 graphics hardware (41 million triangles/sec, 245 million 3D pixels/sec)
• NFC (Near Field Communications), enabling reading and emulating of virtual tags for data transfer and creation of rich solutions for payment and m-commerce.
• Magnetometer / Digital Compass, enabling augmented reality and advanced mapping solutions
• 5 MP camera with support for 720p HD video recording and playback
• JIT (just in time) JavaScript compiler, yielding faster load time and speed of web pages
• Support for additional HTML5 elements, such as HTML5 Video

User agent for the BlackBerry Bold 9900 smartphone:

• Mozilla/5.0 (BlackBerry; U; BlackBerry 9900; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.11+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/7.0.0 Mobile Safari/534.11+

User agent for the BlackBerry Bold 9930 smartphone:

• Mozilla/5.0 (BlackBerry; U; BlackBerry 9930; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.11+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/7.0.0 Mobile Safari/534.11+

Java developers can check out the BlackBerry 7 developer page for more information on the new APIs and to download the new tools needed to get started.

Additionally, BlackBerry® WebWorks™ developers can continue to run their existing BlackBerry WebWorks apps in BlackBerry 7, reaping the benefits of the improved JavaScript compiler as well as having the ability to take advantage of the additional HTML5 elements supported in BlackBerry 7. To get started, BlackBerry WebWorks developers will want to visit the BlackBerry 7 developer page in order to test out the new browser functionality via the simulators for the new BlackBerry Bold 9900 series smartphones.

With the announcement of new BlackBerry® Bold™ 9900 series of smartphones – which include the new BlackBerry 7 OS – comes the announcement of new API features. Now that you know that the new BlackBerry Bold 9900 smartphone and the new BlackBerry Bold 9930 smartphone are on their way, it’s time to start thinking about how your apps will run on these new smartphones running BlackBerry smartphone software version 7.0.

The BlackBerry® Java® Plug-in for Eclipse® and the BlackBerry® Java® Development Environment will both be updated to support the new OS version, and they bring with them an abundance of new APIs taking advantage of new device hardware features:

• OpenGL ES 2.0, taking advantage of the new graphics chip, allows you to create games rich in compelling graphics.
• Window Manager API, also taking advantage of the new graphics chip and increased device horsepower, allows you to overlay OpenGL or any other UI component on top of anything you want, including camera and video.
• Compass APIs, taking advantage of the new magnetometer sensor, allows you to determine the device’s orientation and direction. When combined with Window Manager API, enables the creation of augmented reality applications.
• Near Field Communication (NFC) APIs, taking advantage of the new NFC radio, allows you to read and emulate virtual tags and create rich solutions for payment and m-commerce.
• Video capture APIs updated with support for HD video recording, taking advantage of the improved camera, allows your application to provide the user with the same high end media experience they get from the core apps.

Beyond supporting new hardware features, there are also new APIs to further enable the Super Apps experience:

• Send Menu API, allowing apps to share content with contacts the same way that core apps do, by adding a “Send…” menu to their apps.
• Unified Search API has been updated, making integration with this device feature easier than ever before and allowing more control of indexed keywords.
• BlackBerry® Maps API has also been updated, simplifying how data is overlaid on top of BlackBerry Maps. Couple that with support for geofencing and the ability to overlay complex shapes and polygons, and you’ve got the richest integration with BlackBerry Maps to date.
• Options API has evolved to match the new look and feel of the BlackBerry 6 options screens, allowing third party apps to add their own entries into the options screen including an icon and descriptive text.
• Multimedia API has added support for buffer control for playback and bitrate definition for video recording.
• Barcode API has been updated to support ZXing 1.6 and allow for the definition of custom decorders.

With the upcoming beta release, scheduled for late May, application vendors will have the opportunity to not only begin porting their apps to support the new device launches, but also the opportunity to take advantage of new platform features, offering an application experience optimized for BlackBerry smartphones.

Stay tuned to the BlackBerry Developer’s Blog for the official start of the beta for BlackBerry Java SDK v7.0, including beta simulators for the new BlackBerry Bold 9900 smartphone and BlackBerry Bold 9930 smartphone.