Though all the attention in the smartphone business seems to be on iPhone and Android (and a little bit on Nokia and Windows Phone), Blackberries are still widely popular in many countries, both because many people like physical QWERTY keyboards, but also because they often provide superior connectivity (since I personally don’t have one I’m curios to whether this is really the case in rural areas - input would be welcome).
So it may be of interest in certain settings to use Blackberries as modems
Alternatively, like any smartphone they can of course access our HTML5 solution (has anyone tried that?) and also run native apps, e.g. with Phonegap:
I am pretty sure the market for Blackberry is going down in all places.
Fewer health workers use blackberries and this number is on the decrease. Probably in the context’s where we work, Blackberries are more in number than iPhones, but that is also rapidly changing to Androids. Sadly, there are fewer hardware QWERTY android devices anymore and this seems to be decreasing due to lower margins on these devices.
So, with phonegap you can indeed cover more ground. That’s why we covered it as part of our open-source course.
But one still needs to have a separate build project for Blackberry.
I am of the opinion that it doesn’t make much sense supporting Blackberry given that it’s a dwindling market.
Windows Phone on the other hand is gaining market share, especially in the context we want to focus. Thus, we should definitely have a phonegap build for that…
Though all the attention in the smartphone business seems to be on iPhone and Android (and a little bit on Nokia and Windows Phone), Blackberries are still widely popular in many countries, both because many people like physical QWERTY keyboards, but also because they often provide superior connectivity (since I personally don’t have one I’m curios to whether this is really the case in rural areas - input would be welcome).
So it may be of interest in certain settings to use Blackberries as modems
Alternatively, like any smartphone they can of course access our HTML5 solution (has anyone tried that?) and also run native apps, e.g. with Phonegap: