I've encountered a few things that I think could improve the BB Storm imensely.
1. Being able to run applets and midlets on the web. I've tried the BB browser and Opera and both send applets and midlets to the JVM, which unfortunately can run very few. This is a serious limitation. With the powerful GPU in the Broadcom chipset in the Storm, it's a wonderful opportunity to differentiate in features from other phones. I'm unclear, but I believe that the IPhone can't run applets, but can run standard J2ME midlets (the blackberry isn't even good at this). Needs improvement and I believe that support for Java SE from the browser could be supported without violating the tight security that blackberry is known for.
2. I'd love to know the roadmap for this feature and the format in which it's supported. Currently there is 128MB of app memory (flash), 872MB persistent data memory and local file system flash memory, 128MB RAM for running the applications, processes, allocating memory, etc, etc.. and finally, 8G of Flash SD memory card.
Now, the size of 128MB of application memory is really limiting. Applications should be runnable from the SD card.
There are 2 ways as to how this can be provided.
a) by blackberry altering the launch part of their OS utilities to launch from SD memory card. There could be a directory called something like _applications/vendor that vendors could install their applications to (kind of like Program Files in MS Windows).
b) All RIM really needs to do is provide the API I asked for in a previous post. Allow people to load apps to RAM and get the first descriptor and launch using this. Currently this only works if it is saved to App memory first. If the save is not necessary then 3rd party people could provide apps to launch other apps from SD memory card. To do this currently results in flash being written each time and this would shorten the app memory flash lifecycle (which supports only 100K erase-writes). This problem is overcome by not having to save it as you'd be running from RAM.
I am working on an idea that reduces the number of writes using a special algorithm, but I don't want to invest all that effort without knowing how RIM is going to support it. If they come out with a) above, then that would put my application out of business. With b) above, my application could be altered to not save it to flash, and would just work better.
Thanks
-Donald
