No, this is not a joke. During the BlackBerry Developer Conference in San Francisco, the Loopt app for BlackBerry was demoed and brings some features to the table that — gasp! — best the iPhone’s version of Loopt! Stop laughing. We are serious! OK, so what features? The location based friend-tracking service will enable location updates running in the background (so you don’t have to have the app open to keep track of where your friends and contacts may be) .
The updated BlackBerry app will also take full advantage of the new “Pulse” suggestions feature for BlackBerry devices, where you can receive recommendation notifications of places or events based on your location — again, through background processing. So you can be listening to music, answering emails, playing games, surfing the web and still know when your friends or colleages are close so you can coordinate an impromptu get together. Right now, that level of background processing is something you just can’t do with the iPhone (you have to be running the app on the iPhone to get any location based info on your friends or for businesses). With Loopt’s coupon support, the BlackBerry app can also serve you up with discounts for those businesses or restaurants nearby. The price for all of this functionality? FREE.
Get Loopt for BlackBerry Here.
My issue with the whole “apps on a Blackberry” concept is that, because BB gives such limited storage and you can’t store to the memory card, you can, at best, have just a few apps on the device at a time. Pretty quickly you will fill it up and between that and the memory leaks the devices start locking up and becoming unstable.
Dan, that point is HUGE. I think every single BB user out there has run into this problem. You’ve got too many apps (or even just a single “memory hog” app) that just renders the device practically unusable; forcing battery pulls/hard resets or even full on OS reloads.
So, while all of the move to make app development more attractive for mobile developers, as well as supporting more rich content (the partnerships with Adobe and the acquisition of Torch Mobile to help expedite a new WebKit-based browser) are totally exciting — at the end of the day the OS that these services must run on top of is still dated in comparison to the other platforms.
It’s gonna be a marriage of hardware (new, faster processors and MORE on-board memory) and software (revamped OS…5.0 is an evolutionary improvement, but RIM really needs a REVOLUTIONARY update here). I will not lie to you, I am excited at the direction RIM is moving towards. I think they’re moving fast, and the folks at BBDC from RIM are completely passionate about improving the “BlackBerry experience.” So, yeah, while this does excite consumers and developers alike, the thing will be if it runs properly. Flash, WebKit, OpenGL ES, etc are fantastic; but, if I can’t even run them on a device due to constant JVM errors and memory leaks, then it does me no good.
RIM has made some big announcements here in SF this week, hopefully these concerns (which seem to be shared by all BB users) won’t be left unaddressed by RIM.