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!

We’ve just updated our ‘Choosing a Target Device OS’ page on BlackBerry® Developer Zone. The latest stats containing February 2011 data will help you understand the different Operating Systems used by those users who have downloaded free and paid apps in the BlackBerry App World™ storefront. From there, you can get a sense of what the market is for the version of BlackBerry® Device Software you want to target.

Here are some highlights from these recent stats:

• 98% of users who downloaded free apps in BlackBerry App World were using devices running BlackBerry Device Software v4.5 or higher
• 100% of customers that purchased paid apps in App World were using devices running BlackBerry Device Software v4.5 or higher

Also to note, 81% and 90% of BlackBerry platform users who downloaded free and paid apps respectively in BlackBerry App World were using devices running BlackBerry Device Software v5.0 and v6.0. Those are huge numbers. If you haven’t yet considered implementing new features using the BlackBerry® Java® SDK 5.0 or 6.0 APIs, now might be a good time to start.

For more OS and BlackBerry App World information, check out Choosing a Target Device OS.

Let us know if you have any questions about targeting a specific OS in the comments!

In most cases when a carrier partnership agreement is achieved, the billing and/or authentication is done using the cell phone number of the BlackBerry smartphone.  Traditionally, this requirement meant that you’d call Phone.getDevicePhoneNumber(boolean format) to retrieve the user’s BlackBerry smartphone cell number.  However, if the user is using BlackBerry® Mobile Voice System (BlackBerry MVS), getDevicePhoneNumber() will not return their cell phone number, but instead will return the phone number used for BlackBerry MVS.  Uh-oh, did your app just create a support incident?  If you’ve been keeping up with platform features, the answer is no.

When a user is connected to BlackBerry MVS, the whole point is to use it as much as possible, thus getting its maximum benefit.  Thus, the user’s work number / the number associated with BlackBerry MVS now becomes the user’s default phone number – which is exactly what will be returned by getDevicePhoneNumber().  This new default phone number might cause a problem for the billing and/or authentication of your application through the carrier, since your application might be expecting the user’s cell number to be returned – not the BlackBerry MVS number.

So how do you handle this situation?

Option A: Make the user do it.

Since the user does have the ability to manually set which phone number to use, you could take a hard-nosed stance and make the user do all the work.  In order for the user to change this setting, they need to go into the Phone application, select “Options” from the menu, select “Work line,” then select “Line and Network Preferences,” and finally choose the right number using the drop down box labelled “Default line for outgoing calls.”  Save this change and you’re done.  With no change required to your app, getDevicePhoneNumber() now returns the cell number to you.  However, you’ve now just put a ton of onus on the user, reduced the effectiveness of BlackBerry MVS, and likely still generated a support call.

Option B: Take advantage of new platform features and use the new APIs.

Use the following API functionality added in BlackBerry Device Software 5.0:

int[] lineIds = Phone.getLineIds();
String phoneNumber = null;
for( int i=0; i < lineIds.length; i++ ) {
if(Phone.getLineType(lineIds[i]) == Phone.MOBILE_TYPE) {
//found the user’s cell number
phoneNumber = Phone.getLineNumber(lineIds[i]);
} else if Phone.getLineType(lineIds[i] == Phone.PBX_TYPE) {
//found the number used for BlackBerry MVS
}
}

With less than 10 lines of code, your app is more robust, BlackBerry MVS friendly, and can reliably provide the cell phone number to the carrier.  Personally, I like my carrier relationships, so I’ll go with option B.  But the choice is yours!

Have you tried out this tip? Let us know how it went in the comments!

• BlackBerry® Bold™ 9700 BlackBerry Smartphone Simulator (v5.0.0.337)
• BlackBerry® Storm™ 9550 BlackBerry Smartphone Simulator (v5.0.0.334)
• BlackBerry® Curve™ 8530 BlackBerry Smartphone Simulator (v5.0.0.337)
• Networking Transports II (Video)

Tune in next week for more Developer Resource Friday fun, and don’t forget to post a comment about your favorite article and articles you would like to see!