Fully-booked event demonstrates excitement for BlackBerry 10 amongst Middle East developer community

10 July 2012, Dubai, UAE - The BlackBerry® 10 Jam World Tour came to Dubai yesterday, providing Middle East developers with the opportunity to learn more about the unique capabilities of BlackBerry® 10 and join the growing list of partners developing for the new platform. More than 250 developers attended the hands-on event at The Address Hotel, Dubai Marina, illustrating the high level of interest in the BlackBerry 10 platform by the thriving Middle Eastern developer community.

To help mobile developers start creating apps for the BlackBerry 10 platform, qualified developers at the BlackBerry 10 Jam event were provided with BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha devices to test their apps, helping ensure they are ready and available to customers when BlackBerry 10 launches.*

Sandeep Saihgal, Managing Director Middle East at RIM, says: "The response to BlackBerry 10 from our local developer community, as well as the global developer community, has been amazing and we are excited to be working with local developers who want to be among the first to build and showcase their apps on the BlackBerry 10 platform.

"We are proud of our strong connections with the talented community of developers in the Middle East region and believe this cooperation will be taken to the next level by the powerful programming tools that BlackBerry 10 offers."

Mohamed Ali, Co-CEO ZeroWire Labs, says: "There is growing excitement in our company for BlackBerry 10. We have already experienced great success with the launch of our BlackBerry smartphone apps in this region, including Sports Vibe and Boum App. With growth in demand for Arabic apps and the high penetration of BlackBerry smartphones in the Middle East, BlackBerry 10 is going to create a significant opportunity for developers."

Applications created with any of the BlackBerry 10 tools will run on BlackBerry 10 smartphones as well as BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablets when the new platform becomes available for the PlayBook.

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*Note: Qualified developers will be determined by RIM using applicant information from the registration system. If you have already received a BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha device at a previous BlackBerry developer event or from RIM, you are not eligible for this offer. Registrants who apply will be notified within 24 hours before the event if they are qualified to receive a device at BlackBerry 10 Jam. Qualified developers must collect their device in person at the World Tour event that they are registered for. Photo identification must be provided at the time of collection. Registrants cannot receive more than one (1) BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha device during the BlackBerry 10 Jam World Tour.

The BlackBerry 10 developer toolkit includes the BlackBerry® 10 Native SDK with Cascades™, which allows developers to create graphically rich, high-performance native applications in C/C++ using Qt. The Native SDK for BlackBerry 10 has a rich set of APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) that give developers access to core device features and a range of BlackBerry application services, such as Push and Payment services. Cascades is a powerful native application development toolset that allows developers to easily build visually stunning applications without having to write complex, low-level graphics code.

The toolkit also includes support for HTML5 application developers with the BlackBerry® 10 WebWorks™ SDK, allowing developers to create native-like applications using common web programming technologies. The BlackBerry 10 WebWorks SDK allows them to use HTML5 and CSS for building apps and provides JavaScript bindings to native device APIs along with RIM's open source UI toolkit, bbUI.js, to create applications with native-like capabilities. In this initial release of the BlackBerry 10 WebWorks SDK, developers have access to a core subset of the full WebWorks APIs.

All of the SDKs will be updated to give developers access to more of the unique capabilities of BlackBerry 10 over the coming months.

Additional Useful Links for Developers:
BlackBerry Jam Zone: http://developer.blackberry.com
@BlackBerryDev: http://www.twitter.com/blackberrydev

More details about the NDK for BlackBerry 10 are posted on http://devblog.blackberry.com/2012/04/blackberry-10-native-sdk and for Cascades at http://devblog.blackberry.com/2012/04/blackberry-10-cascades-available-now.

The NDK for BlackBerry 10, including Cascades, is available for download at http://developer.blackberry.com/native/download.

More details about the BlackBerry 10 WebWorks SDK are posted on http://devblog.blackberry.com/2012/04/blackberry-10-webworks-sdk.

The BlackBerry 10 WebWorks SDK is available at http://developer.blackberry.com/html5/download.

Developer Success Stories: https://bdsc.webapps.blackberry.com/devzone/whyblackberry/stories

Media Contact
Rohan Cornelio
First & 42nd (PR agency for RIM)
Rohan.cornelio@first42.com

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© Press Release 2012