With the recent announcement of the new BlackBerry® Style™ 9670 smartphone, I wanted to provide an overview of the device from the developer perspective, in order to give our developers a better understanding of what this new smartphone means to them.
The BlackBerry Style 9670 smartphone features the BlackBerry® 6 operating system, which has been featured in a series of posts on BlackBerry® Developer Zone over the past few months. BlackBerry® 6 on the BlackBerry Style 9670 continues the same great development platform as the BlackBerry® Torch™ 9800 smartphone, enabling richer Java® applications, advanced graphical capabilities, and of course, the highly touted web experience with BlackBerry® WebWorks™ platform and a browser supporting HTML5 and CSS3.
So if you’re already an expert in BlackBerry 6, what do you need to think about when developing for the BlackBerry Style 9670 smartphone? Primarily, you need to think about the fact that it’s a flip phone:
- Use the Sensor class to detect when it’s open or closed
- Recognize that it follows the same design paradigm as the BlackBerry® Pearl™ Flip series smartphone, where the internal screen behaves just like a traditional display area and the external screen takes on functions for representing clock, incoming call information, album art, and banner notifications for new messages, calendar reminders, etc.
- The supported banner notifications also include third party ApplicationIndicators.
- Even when flipped closed, media events are sent to third party apps via MediaActionHandler.
To coincide with the enhancements to the BlackBerry® Browser in BlackBerry 6 with the inclusion of the new WebKit rendering engine, we are continuing the new User Agent header definitions from the BlackBerry Torch 9800 smartphone to the BlackBerry Style 9670 smartphone. This User Agent definition reflects the type of web content supported by the browser, ensuring that your mobile and desktop websites are providing the best possible content and experience.
Mozilla/5.0 (BlackBerry; U; BlackBerry 9670; en) AppleWebKit/534.3+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.0.0.286 Mobile Safari/534.3+
Other hardware features:
- The first BlackBerry smartphone with flip and a full QWERTY keyboard
- The first BlackBerry smartphone to support OpenGL ES 1.1
- Support for OpenVG 1.1
- Dual-Band: 800/1900 MHz CDMA/EVDO Rev A networks
- 360 x 400 internal screen resolution
- 240 x 320 external display resolution
- 5.0 MP Camera with Flash, Auto Focus, Image Stabilization, and 640 x 480 video recording
- Location Support through Assisted and Autonomous GPS
- Wi-Fi® Support – 802.11 b/g/n
- Storage: 8 GB microSD included, with support for up to 32 GB
- App memory space: 512MB onboard memory
Get started with the BlackBerry Style now by downloading the simulator here!
