14 DAY TRIAL // Jim Balsillie, Co-CEO of Canadian mobile phone maker Research In Motion, stated recently that the company disapproves of the closed development environment that Apple put in place for the builders of applications for its smartphones and tablets.
According to Balsillie, RIM's Blackberry development environment offers developers the possibility to come up with applications for the BlackBerry devices without having to write native code.
Moreover, app builders can use Adobe AIR SDK in case they want to deliver applications for the newly unveiled BlackBerry PlayBook tablet PC.
In contrast with this, Apple keeps a closed development environment, without offering support for standard technologies such as Adobe's Flash multimedia software.
“We believe that you can bring the mobile to the Web but you don't need to go through some kind of control point of an SDK and that's the core part of our message,” said Balsillie at the Web 2.0 Summit, a recent article on eweek reads.
“You don't need an app for the Web,” he continues, adding that developers should not be confined to the use of a special defined set of development tools.
However, Apple already has a large number of applications available in the App Store, while RIM still has a long road to walk until it gets there.
The two companies battle for supremacy at the high-end of the market, and it does not come as a surprise that RIM would comment on Apple's practices.
With the launch of BlakcBerry Playbook, following the availability of the iPad earlier this year, the battle is expected to move to the tablet PC market as well, and the first signs of this state of facts already emerged.
RIM has come up with a video aimed at showing us how the unreleased and unfinished Playbook tablet can perform when compared to the Apple iPad.
According to the Canadian company, the PlayBook offers superior Internet browsing capabilities, complemented by great Flash performance, a perfect score on the Acid 3 browser test, and more. Take a look at the video below to make an idea of how the two devices perform.