What's up with the BlackBerry developer community? Your developer conference is coming up soon, right?

This year we're excited to make it bigger and better than ever before, with new capabilities coming to the platform. Developers can attend almost 100 sessions and interact with experts they wouldn't get access to otherwise. With the launch of BlackBerry 6 and the WebKit browser, we're hoping to attract new developers.

One of the things that's kind of unique for our conference: for the first 3 days we do keynotes and breakout sessions, but on the last day we have a developer day. After 3 days of us answering questions, it's RIM's opportunity to be quiet and listen to developers. All of the key people are there to make sure that messages developers have for us are heard.

One of the things we've been working on for the past year--and this has taken root with OS 6--is exemplified in BlackBerry widgets. Widgets are the middle ground between a Web app and a Java app. We've got standard plug-ins to VisualStudio and Eclipse to allow developers to build applications in HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Developers get all the benefits of BlackBerry without having to learn or know Java. That's resonating really well with our community, even more so with OS 6.

Are Widgets backwards compatible? 

We support widgets in BlackBerry OS 5. OS 5 is starting to have broad penetration in the market.

How is the effort to build an app store for BlackBerry going?

There's a couple things I would say to that. The success of BlackBerry App World, without any push behind it in the past, has been great. There are over 30 million people using BlackBerry App World themselves, we just started pre-loading it on the BlackBerry Torch. That'll make a big difference in terms of awareness. Perhaps more important than that is that we're getting more than 1 million downloads today. Last, but not least, is BlackBerry App World 2.0 is in beta now. It will add a new billing model. Traditionally, we've been using PayPal, but we've now made that a very seamless process so people can easily buy an app in 2 clicks.

A primary developer complaint is that the BlackBerry handset ecosystem is fragmented and inconsistent, feature-wise. Care to comment?

It is true. The flip side is, that's true for every person that makes a handset today. It's the same with Apple and with Nokia. They all have this problem, and it was the same for Windows in the PC era. The difference is that in the smart phone world, things are happening so much faster, so you tend to see more of that fragmentation. 

Is BlackBerry 6 a clean break?

We definitely see people using BlackBerry 6 as an opportunity to take applications they've built already and close them out, and almost start again in BlackBerry 6. There's so many new capabilities and new APIs, there's a lot of code developers have written for previous versions that they don't need now. We've got a scenario where developers say “I don't want to carry that code for that button any more, and I will use these new APIs.”

But, of course thats not for everybody. Applications written today will run just as well on BlackBerry 6. We do offer forwards compatibility.

What do developers think of BlackBerry 6 so far?

The feedback has been incredibly positive. One of the interesting things is it's aligning with the super app stuff RIM has been talking about. We want to show people the differentiators, like being able to run in the background, like being able to use push notification. 

What's the response been to your move to WebKit?

A lot of developers are building really compelling Web experiences. We've matched some of the benefits of the existing browser, such as security and compression, with the new rendering capabilities and JavaScript engine of WebKit. It's not enough to say we've ported something on another platform, We've actually innovated so we can compress content to about 40 percent of the size.

What do developers think about the fact that all BlackBerry traffic runs through RIM's servers?

It tends to not be an issue. And it doesn't have to in all cases. There are a variety of alternatives for developers. We explain the benefits of when it does go through our servers. We manage a lot of that complexity for our developer community. And we're building another layer of developer services on top of that, like our new ad service, to make it that much easier for developers on our platform. That stems from our mentality of how to use wireless and going steps further.