Developing for the Blackberry…

Developing for the BlackBerry really has me appreciating the iPhone even more!

It’s not that the development is hard…in fact it’s pretty easy if you’ve got any sort of background in Java (which I luckily do).

The problem is that all the physical devices are different…different screen sizes, different handset options…which means that to be compatible with as much hardware as possible, you’ve got to do a lot of extra work and dumb certain things down quite a bit.

When you are developing for the iPhone, you don’t really have to worry about the screen size or basic features…sure there are some advanced features that are only available in certain devices/OS versions and the iPad is a completely new size device…but still the variations on your code base are not nearly as involved as doing anything for the BlackBerry platform.

So overall, I give BlackBerry +1 for picking Java (because of my experience I find it much easier than Objective-C so far)…but I give iPhone +10 for standardizing/commoditizing the hardware (and yes, Droid is going to have many of the same problems)