RIM has announced its entry into the tablet market -- or at least its intention to enter the tablet market early next year -- and as predicted, the BlackBerry PlayBook won't be so much a scaled-up smartphone as a stepbrother to the existing phone line. It will have an entirely new operating system (a version of the recently acquired QNX dubbed "Tablet OS") unrelated to the familiar but long-in-the-tooth BlackBerry OS.
The PlayBook's target audience of business consumers won't care much about the technical details -- but for the all-important developer community, the move is a disruptive one. It's also another nail in the coffin of Oracle's Java ME platform.
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The operating system for BlackBerrys has become an anomaly of late; its app development platform has to this point faithfully stuck by Oracle's mobile Java platform, which has become increasingly sidelined in the world of modern smartphones. (The Android platform is based on a modified version of desktop Java, which avoids the need to pay licensing feeds to Oracle, one of the factors behind the Oracle-Google lawsuit.)
According to RIM's website, Tablet OS developers are currently slated to build apps in HTML5/CSS/JavaScript bundles or in Flash. "Add a new dimension to your BlackBerry development skills and create compelling applications for a new mobile form factor that complements your existing application" appears to be the euphemism that marketing cooked up for "you're going to have to learn a whole new set of development tools."
A lot about this picture isn't clear yet; the developer tools for Tablet OS haven't been released, and QNX founder Dan Dodge says existing BlackBerry apps will run on the PlayBook -- perhaps in some kind of emulation layer. But RIM's marked failure to promote Tablet OS as an extension of the existing BlackBerry development ecosystem says volumes about where the company sees its software environment going.
In fact, the other big news from BlackBerry's DevCon this week -- the introduction of the WebWorks development platform for BlackBerry OS -- seems to be an extension of the same story. With WebWorks, developers can build BlackBerry OS apps out of HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript, and it's reasonable to assume that this platform or a variation on it will be central to Tablet OS development.
All this is introducing a great deal of uncertainty into the lives of BlackBerry developers. There'll be a learning curve for what's essentially a brand-new tablet platform, and they could probably be forgiven for taking a wait-and-see approach toward the BlackBerry OS, as RIM may have intended to eventually move its phones to a QNX-derived operating system as well.
But the biggest loser has to be Oracle, as the profit-making Java ME platform appears to be shut out of yet another next-generation operating system. It may be time for Oracle -- which, having only recently acquired Java, could benefit from its lack of sentimentality about the technology -- to ease Java ME, which was designed to fit environments much more resource-constrained than modern smartphones and tablets, out to pasture.
This article, "With BlackBerry PlayBook, RIM charts a course away from Java ME," was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Get the first word on what the important tech news really means with the InfoWorld Tech Watch blog.