With the recent announcement of the new BlackBerry® Style™ 9670 smartphone, I wanted to provide an overview of the device from the developer perspective, in order to give our developers a better understanding of what this new smartphone means to them.

The BlackBerry Style 9670 smartphone features the BlackBerry® 6 operating system, which has been featured in a series of posts on BlackBerry® Developer Zone over the past few months. BlackBerry® 6 on the BlackBerry Style 9670 continues the same great development platform as the BlackBerry® Torch™ 9800 smartphone, enabling richer Java® applications, advanced graphical capabilities, and of course, the highly touted web experience with BlackBerry® WebWorks™ platform and a browser supporting HTML5 and CSS3.

So if you’re already an expert in BlackBerry 6, what do you need to think about when developing for the BlackBerry Style 9670 smartphone? Primarily, you need to think about the fact that it’s a flip phone:

• Use the Sensor class to detect when it’s open or closed
• Recognize that it follows the same design paradigm as the BlackBerry® Pearl™ Flip series smartphone, where the internal screen behaves just like a traditional display area and the external screen takes on functions for representing clock, incoming call information, album art, and banner notifications for new messages, calendar reminders, etc.
• The supported banner notifications also include third party ApplicationIndicators.
• Even when flipped closed, media events are sent to third party apps via MediaActionHandler.

To coincide with the enhancements to the BlackBerry® Browser in BlackBerry 6 with the inclusion of the new WebKit rendering engine, we are continuing the new User Agent header definitions from the BlackBerry Torch 9800 smartphone to the BlackBerry Style 9670 smartphone. This User Agent definition reflects the type of web content supported by the browser, ensuring that your mobile and desktop websites are providing the best possible content and experience.

Mozilla/5.0 (BlackBerry; U; BlackBerry 9670; en) AppleWebKit/534.3+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.0.0.286 Mobile Safari/534.3+

Other hardware features:

• The first BlackBerry smartphone with flip and a full QWERTY keyboard
• The first BlackBerry smartphone to support OpenGL ES 1.1
• Support for OpenVG 1.1
• Dual-Band: 800/1900 MHz CDMA/EVDO Rev A networks
• 360 x 400 internal screen resolution
• 240 x 320 external display resolution
• 5.0 MP Camera with Flash, Auto Focus, Image Stabilization, and 640 x 480 video recording
• Location Support through Assisted and Autonomous GPS
• Wi-Fi® Support – 802.11 b/g/n
• Storage: 8 GB microSD included, with support for up to 32 GB
• App memory space: 512MB onboard memory

Get started with the BlackBerry Style now by downloading the simulator here!

I have always been an advocate of creating rich mobile web content that’s efficiently designed and optimized for my visitors.  I know BlackBerry smartphone users dislike the experience of being required to download unnecessary web content because a mobile-friendly version of the page is not available.

Figure 1: www.blackberry.com

Creating mobile web content requires an understanding of the physical constraints inherent in all mobile platforms.  These constraints include battery life, small screen size, limited network bandwidth, differences in input methods and restrictions on supported content.

In order to target web content appropriately for BlackBerry smartphone users, the web application must detect the BlackBerry Browser.  By reading and interpreting the values of the Profile or UserAgent HTTP headers, you can determine whether your visitor is accessing your site via the BlackBerry Browser. If the Profile header indicates the BlackBerry Browser is present, you can then display a BlackBerry optimized version of the page.  I’d recommend using the Profile header over the UserAgent header in your browser detection logic, since UserAgent values are commonly spoofed.

Figure 2: Page I created to display the Profile and UserAgent header values.

The BlackBerry Browser continues to get better and better.  The recent BlackBerry® Java® Application Development v5.0 Beta 3 release includes significant improvements in the BlackBerry Browser APIs.  For instance, there will soon be support for Gears and SQLite, as well as progressive support for HTML5. Improved integration with core BlackBerry smartphone applications like email, calendar and contacts has also been added and continues to grow steadily in a positive direction.

Check out the BlackBerry® Developer Zone for tons of helpful learning resources on the BlackBerry Browser:

• BlackBerry Browser Documentation
• BlackBerry Web Development Videos
• BlackBerry Browser Development Knowledge Base articles
• Web Development Forums

I’d like to hear about your success stories in developing web content for the BlackBerry Browser.  How has mobile web content changed or improved your web site or business?