RIM along with its latest results confirmed that it would support Android apps on the BlackBerry PlayBook. The seven-inch tablet will have a Java engine that not only supports legacy BlackBerry Java apps but those running Android 2.3. The apps will need “players” to work but just need to be repackaged to be downloadable through BlackBerry App World.
Coming soon will be an open beta of the native SDK, which allows C or C++ code and theoretically much faster performance than the usual AIR, Flash and Java code for PlayBook apps.
Both Android support and the beta native SDK are due in the summer, RIM said. It’s not clear what Java engine RIM will use, although it may want to avoid Oracle’s lawsuit against Google over allegedly copying Java code in Android’s Dalvik engine.
