BlackBerry DevCon

Continuing the trend of going green at conferences, this years BlackBerry Developer Conference (DevCon) sported little more than a hotel key sized badge, and session catalog of a few pages. No bag, no software inserts, and even minimal vendors ads. At registration, you were also given a certificate for a BlackBerry pull-over. So again, even there, they assumed that you might not want it, and didn't give it to you by default.

 

Through the week more schwag was gently introduced, but not much. A few pins showed up. Water bottles (sponsored). And then at the very end, you could apparently trade in session reviews for a backpack. I didn't get that far, but the backpack looked decent overall, while it was reported that the straps were slender and painful over time.

 

Why was Adobe at BlackBerry DevCon? BlackBerry introduced their new PlayBook tablet. From the user interface (UI) side, pretty much everything is Adobe AIR - a runtime for HTML and Flash content outside of the browser (think applications). The application launcher, browser, PDF viewer, and all the default applications are all built on Adobe AIR. It's a great win for Adobe, and if played more aggressively, will really put RIM back in the smart phone game.

Done