[Sigia-l] Blackberry Usability Guidelines

[Russ Unger]

> I don't know much about Blackberry, but Macromedia recently 
> announced Flash
> Lite 1.1 for mobile devices, which would open up a whole new box of UI
> opportunities. T-Mobile/Siemens have been talking about this 
> wrt licensed
> Blackberry client, but I don't know what compatibility issues 
> there may be.

There's something to note here, and that's that Macromedia hasn't yet
received placement of FlashLite 1.1 on a lot of mobile devices as of yet
and they're still working on getting into that space.  There's also a
lot of standards in place from either the carriers or the manufacturers
as to how they'll prioritize applications, possibly what keys they'll
allow/disallow, etc. and that's not even mentioning the differences in
keys that the manufacturers all support, which could be a nightmare.

I may be mistaken, but I do believe that Macromedia provides either an
SDK or something similar (hopefully someone from MM can validate or deny
this) to either the carriers or the manufacturers that give some degree
of flexibility as to how they "set up" Flash on their devices, which
means that you'd probably need to know the exact model of phone you'd be
designing and developing for and then work within those set of rules.

I think it's great that they're working in that space, and I think we'll
see some interesting things coming down the pipe utilizing FlashLite,
but it may take longer to get 1.1 into the market than it takes to
create another version for them!

Russ