Research In Motion (RIM), the makers of BlackBerry, will provide its PlayBook tablet for free to the Indian App developers so that they can work on porting Android based applications to the BlackBerry platform. RIM has conducted a similar program internationally as well some time back.
Annie Mathew, head of alliances and developer relation at RIM in India told to the Mobile Indian: “RIM will be providing free BlackBerry PlayBooks to developers in India this month which will help them in porting and testing of the applications on the BB Platform and in return help us add more Android based applications to the list”.
The addition of the capability to run Android based applications on the BlackBerry PlayBook is one of the much anticipated features that the users are looking out for. And if everything goes well, then we will see a large catalog of popular Android based application that can be successfully run on the Blackberry platform.
Notably, a couple of days back RIM’s vice president for developer relations, Alec Saunders twitted that his company will give a free BlackBerry Playbook tablet to coders who port their Android application for its BlackBerry Tablet OS.
For participating in this campaign, developers have to be registered with BlackBerry App World and they would be eligible for a 16 GB PlayBook if they port their apps and submit it to BlackBerry’s App World between February 2 and February 13. RIM wants that all the apps submitted meet its BlackBerry App World Vendor Guidelines.
Later this month, RIM will also be releasing se the 2.0 upgrade for the Table OS, which the company previewed last month at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.