On August 3rd, 2011 Research In Motion® (RIM®) announced the arrival of three new BlackBerry® Torch™ smartphones. A few months ago, we explained the impact of the BlackBerry® Bold™ 9900 and BlackBerry® Bold™ 9930 smartphones to developers; today we’re doing the same for the next three smartphones that will be running BlackBerry® 7 OS: the BlackBerry® Torch™ 9810 smartphone and the all-touch BlackBerry® Torch™ 9850 and 9860 smartphones.

Common features to the newly announced smartphones running BlackBerry 7 OS are:

• 32-bit color (24 bits of color and 8 bits of transparency)
• 1.2 GHz Processor
• Magnetometer / Digital Compass, enabling augmented reality and advanced mapping solutions
• 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)
• 5 MP camera with support for 720p HD video recording
• JIT (Just-In-Time) JavaScript® compiler, yielding faster page download time than BlackBerry® 6
• Support for additional HTML5 elements, such as HTML5 Video

Key features for developers (BlackBerry Torch 9810 smartphone):

• VGA (640 x 480) screen resolution
• 8 GB of onboard memory, with microSD support for up to 32GB
• User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (BlackBerry; U; BlackBerry 9810; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.11+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/7.0.0 Mobile Safari/534.11+

Key features for developers (BlackBerry Torch 9850 and 9860 smartphones):

• WVGA (800 x 480) screen resolution
• 4 GB of onboard memory, with microSD support for up to 32GB
• User agent (9850): Mozilla/5.0 (BlackBerry; U; BlackBerry 9850; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.11+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/7.0.0 Mobile Safari/534.11+
• User agent (9860): Mozilla/5.0 (BlackBerry; U; BlackBerry 9860; en-US)AppleWebKit/534.11+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/7.0.0 Mobile Safari/534.11+

Whether you’re a BlackBerry® Java® developer or a BlackBerry® WebWorks™ developer, the tools are available, the simulators are available, and the BlackBerry App World™ vendor portal is accepting submissions for all BlackBerry 7 OS smartphones. If you haven’t submitted your apps yet, now is the time!

If you have any questions about developing for BlackBerry 7 OS smartphones, let us know in the comments!

If you haven’t already heard about the newly announced BlackBerry® Theme Studio 6.0 Public Beta at DEVCON 2010, we are excited to cover all the details here in this post. The number of published themes on BlackBerry App World™ has grown tremendously since the introduction of the Themes category last year. To showcase this popular category, the latest BlackBerry App World 2.0 client features the top 25 downloaded BlackBerry® smartphone themes. So if you are looking to get your theme up on the list for BlackBerry 6 devices, I hope your BlackBerry Theme Studio 6.0 public beta tool and BlackBerry® Torch™ 9800 simulator are already installed!

Let’s dive into the newly added features in BlackBerry Theme Studio 6.0 Public Beta.

Theme support for BlackBerry 6.0 OS devices

Using BlackBerry Theme Builder 6.0, theme developers can now create themes for the BlackBerry Torch 9800 device and publish them on BlackBerry App World. There are several new components that can be themed on BlackBerry 6, such as the new notification bar, popup context menu, and application icon tray. BlackBerry Theme Builder allows you to customize all these new components using the ‘BlackBerry 6′ layout.

The ‘custom’ layout provides a subset of those theme features similar to the custom layout in BlackBerry 5.0 touch screen devices like the BlackBerry® Storm2™ smartphone. However, there are some new additions to allow social feed notifications (BlackBerry® Messenger, Twitter®, Facebook®) and organizational items (Tasks, Memos) to now appear on the home screen as well!

Dynamic wallpaper designs

If you are looking to add some pizzazz to the home screen wallpaper, there are new options now available through the Background Wizard (accessed under the Home Screen tab). You can select a range of images to be cycled as the home screen wallpaper, scheduled periodically or at specific times. I can just sense some great dynamic seasonal themes coming my way this year!

BlackBerry Theme Builder user interface enhancements

We have been listening closely to the great community feedback and improved our tool UI a great deal in this release. If you have already used BlackBerry Theme Studio 5.0, the first thing you will notice is the streamlined user-interface, with the Inspector panel hidden by default.

In its place is the Quick Edit palette at the top of the workspace, which displays the options for the currently-selected element. The new Toolbar on the left side of the workspace lets you switch between Select Mode (where you click on any element to edit it) and Pan Mode (which moves the screen image, as in previous versions). You can also right-click on various components to set new image items or reset them to default.

Veteran theme developers will note that this effectively replaces the Inspector tab with an elegant “click-and-edit” context-sensitive interface. If you prefer the traditional Inspector palette, it can be shown by clicking in the lower right.

Also, in order to jumpstart your theme development, we have provided the ability to set fonts and images across all screens through easy-to-use dialogs, accessed under the Edit menu.

For example, you can apply the same font attributes to multiple screens using the new Change Fonts option.

Another convenient feature added is the ability to replace multiple images on different screens using Theme Studio. In order to do this, you simply create a nested folder structure containing all the images to be replaced, and import the one folder into the theme using the Edit > Change Images option. This is a quick way to initially import all your graphical assets into your theme before tweaking each image. It is essential to maintain the same directory structure and filenames as the base theme; the complete set of correctly sized and named icons can be found in the ‘samples\Themes\Images\BlackBerry6_360x480′ folder of your Theme Studio install folder (by default located in ‘Program Files\Research In Motion\BlackBerry Theme Studio 6.0’).

Theme publishing

Finally, commercial theme developers can go to market faster by using the Publish to BlackBerry App World option in the Export wizard, which prepares the theme as an application package ready for upload on the BlackBerry App World Vendor Portal. You can even use it to easily upgrade the same theme to a newer version on BlackBerry App World through the Vendor Portal.

We would love to hear your feedback for on our Developer Issue Tracker and Community Forums!

Date: August 12, 2010
Event Start Time: 1:00 PM Eastern Standard Time (10:00 AM Pacific Daylight Time)
Duration: 1 hour

A few more topics that will be covered:

• Exciting new device functionality – learn about specs and new features of the BlackBerry Torch smartphone that will help you differentiate your application.
• Merchandising enhancements, particularly the addition of AT&T Carrier Billing to BlackBerry App World™.
• BlackBerry 6 overview – learn about improvements to the UI and new APIs that you can take advantage of when creating your applications.

To find out more information and to register for this event, click here.

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!