At the annual BB Love-fest (aka. BlackBerry DevCon), RIM President & CEO,Mike Lazaridis, greeted the crowd and provided the State of RIM address as well as a roadmap for the future which includes the Blackberry 7 lineup of devices and a new developer platform, Blackberry BBX.
In his address which I caught via live stream I picked up on the following tidbits and numbers of interest:
- There are currently more than 70 million Blackberry subscribers, up 40% over last year
- 165 million smartphones sold to date
- BBM – 28 million last year, today, more than 50 million – up 80%
- AppWorld in 130 countries with over 1 billion downloads and that’s about 5 million downloads per day
- On average, BB developers make more $$
- BBM social platform opened to developers 3 months ago – more than 25 million downloads with 200,000 foursquare downloads in one day
- First tablet certified safe by the US government
- 150 million devices sold, 70 million active users, 1 billion apps downloaded, 140 million apps per month
- BB 7 smartphones generate 11x higher gross app ARPU than BB 6 and BB 5
- Apps are downloaded about 40% more than iOS or Android apps
- Today BBX developer platform, based on open standards – a single, unified platform – OpenGL standards
Particularly exciting for developers is the launch of BlackBerry BBX – The BBX platform will include BBX-OS, and will support BlackBerry cloud services and development environments for both HTML5 and native developers. BBX will also support applications developed using any of the tools available today for the BlackBerry PlayBook – including Native SDK, Adobe AIR/Flash and WebWorks/HTML5, as well as the BlackBerry Runtime for Android Apps – on future BBX-based tablets and smartphones.
See details in this official announcement