Welcome to Kraft Kennedy

I have been using the Nexus One with Android 2.1 for a month and a half in order to get a good insight into the real workings on the Android operating system. To sum up my experience the Nexus One phone is a great piece of hardware but the Android OS still has a long way to go in order to be as functional as a Blackberry or an iPhone.

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Research in Motion (RIM) offers two ways of writing applications for BlackBerry devices–Native Java, and the Microsoft Visual Studio plugin.  As a VB.Net developer, I was tempted to go the Visual Studio plugin approach, but I decided against it for the following reasons:

• It’s geared more towards rapid forms-based applications that communicate by web services.
• It requires the user to be on a BlackBerry Enterprise Server.
• It does not provide access to all of the APIs and BlackBerry features that you get with Java; for example, camera, phone, Bluetooth, address book, GPS, BlackBerry Maps, and BlackBerry Message features.
• It doesn’t support the BlackBerry Storm touch screen and accelerometer.
• Debugging and deployment is more difficult, and the Visual Studio plugin only comes with a BlackBerry Bold simulator.  The Java tools come with a BlackBerry Storm simulator.

For these reasons, to be able to debug for the Storm, and to have access to the entire BlackBerry library, I decided to go with the Java approach.  The transition is quite easy, once you get the development environment in place and write your first test application.  The BlackBerry website has a lot of good information for developers, if you’re able to find it.

I found that this page has everything you need to get started developing BlackBerry applications:

http://na.blackberry.com/eng/developers/resources/tutorials.jsp#tab_tab_development

Rather than copy and paste information from their guides, I’ll just point out some of the things I wish were clearer in each document.

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