Will Flash be part of BlackBerry OS, now that it will no longer support some mobile devices, you mentioned support for framework but Flash for mobile?
Yes, we still support it on the Playbook, and we will continue to support it to ensure a full mobile browsing experience. As far as Flash is concerned, we are definitely continuing to support it for BlackBerry 10. Of course we are seeing that web developers are moving towards non-Flash technologies such as HTML 5 which is trying to provide a much better experience. Especially for the videos and things like that. So yeah, if you see the developer community they are now more moving towards HTML 5, we are seeing a transition happening. But in meantime, Flash isn’t going anywhere from our browser.
What would you like to comment on the move towards HTML 5 as it is still a work in progress. Also standards would probably not be finalised till 2014.
We are fully behind it. It’s an evolving standard and we totally appreciate that. As I mentioned that HTML 5 developers can create fully functional and fully featured applications using HTML 5. You have many cross platforms tools out there to do this. But I don’t think you have any platform to support features in the way you can access native functionality, native features, native APIs through HTML 5. So that’s a big deal because that lets you create a native experience not just with applications and cross platform experience but native experience with HTML 5. In fact, if you look at our support for HTML5 today, you will find significant HTML 5 compliance at HTML5test.com. You can go take a look at it from any browser. You can also look at other benchmark sites. Visit them via mobile browsers and you’ll see BlackBerry 10 ranks the highest. Our current score is over 450 for the HTML 5 test. We are actually part of the consult team and try to support most of the standards to allow developers that much more from early on. Of course it’s evolving and we have already seen a very high interest from developers and it seemed like much easier to adopt and learn compared to languages like objective C, which you had to learn in order to build the iOS. We have seen a lot of good quality applications being built in HTML 5 and the barrier has been reduced. I think BlackBerry 10 will be the showcase for that. We had a session a couple of weeks ago in our conference where we showed eve the BlackBerry browser, this is a true testament, even the browser in BlackBerry 10 is built using HTML 5. It’s similar to creating a web using the web. It’s actually amazing how we built our browser using HTML 5 technology.
