General BlackBerry® Functions and Features

[ccodere]

Greetings there,

                     I have recently had the pleasure to develop on the Blackberry 9700 for my job, and it was a happy experience. I have several questions regarding the Blacberry and its future directions:

- Will there be or is there already (or planned) to have blackberry with more sensor functionnality?

- Will there be or is there already (or planned) to have blackberry specialized for medical diagnosis?

  (I know this is a crazy idea, but with portable scanners and portable bacteria identifiers now available,  it could be an interesting feature)...

More specifically, it would be interesting if some of the Blacberry devices could have one or more of the following sensors:

- Altimeter

- Magnetometer

- Thermometer

- Accelerometer

- Barometer

- Hygrometer
- Photometer
- Range finder / Distance finder
- Luxmeter
- Sound level meter
- Dosimeter (radiation)
- Portable MRI (technology is not ready yet though)

I know my ideas may seem completely crazy, but I think these types of  portable devices will exist eventually on the market one day, and I just wanted to give Blackberry people some ideas!

p.s: I do have a technical background in electronics, with a few years experience, so my idea is probably less crazy than you think!!

hopefully one day we will get those types of devices!

Carl Eric Codere

[JSanders Resident Expert · Accepted solution]

Don't count on anyone from RIM just happening upon your suggestions here, as this is a user to user community support forum.

You might send your suggestions to bbsuggestions@rim.com

[ccodere]

Thank you very much for your kind answer! I did look for their email to send suggestions, and i did not know they had one (I did not look very hard though!)...

Thanks for the information!

Carl

[JSanders Resident Expert]

You're welcome.

It will certainly be interesting to that device if it included all that hardware, and options.

It might look like this

[Xandrex]

I think there is a market for accessories for Blackberry devices (like the USB SIM card reader, or BlueTooth keyboards or printers). But RIM is focusing on delivering standard smartphones, not smartphones with never-seen-yet hardware features apart from the clicky touchscreen of the Storm.

That being said,

• the range finder is physically already available on the Storm since there is an autofocus lens.
• the luxmeter is physically aready available on most devices (proximity sensor and light sensor), though it seems to be binary
• the sound level meter is physically available through the ambiant thing that knows when to enhance sound volume
• the accelerometer is available on Storm / Storm 2 and some games use it like Labyrinth or Pro Bowling or Tiltris.

[ccodere]

Greetings,

                 Thank you for your answer, you are probably right on regarding the focus of RIM, since RIM is more business oriented compared to the iPhone. In that case, do you know if the USB connector can give out some power to power the external devices, or must they be powered by themselves?? I know that for printers, power must be provided externally, but for example, for small sensors which reside on a single chip, which might only require 1 mA or so, can the Blackberry power these devices?

Furthermore, do you know, if the sensors you are talking about can be accessed via Java?? (I am quite new to programming the Blackberry).... (Accelerometer it seems yes, because of the games you are talking about)...

In all cases, thank you for your answer!

[Xandrex]

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ccodere wrote:

In that case, do you know if the USB connector can give out some power to power the external devices, or must they be powered by themselves?? I know that for printers, power must be provided externally, but for example, for small sensors which reside on a single chip, which might only require 1 mA or so, can the Blackberry power these devices?

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I do not know. But for a simple thing as a smartcard reader, it requires its own battery. http://na.blackberry.com/eng/ataglance/security/products/smartcardreader/

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ccodere wrote:

Furthermore, do you know, if the sensors you are talking about can be accessed via Java?? (I am quite new to programming the Blackberry).... (Accelerometer it seems yes, because of the games you are talking about)...

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I do not know either you should read documentation about the BlackBerry APIs available. If you do not find the information, you can go to the "Java development" board and ask for help.