This would be pretty awesome indeed..not only for Playbook users who would instantly have access to all of Android's nice apps, but would also be a boon for developers.

Possible compatibility issues aside, this would be awesome.

They should call it the BlackBook, sounds better to me.

Kevin, I lol'd at how you spelled BG's name in your article ;) oh yea and don't forget the "s." :p

that would be great so many more apps + angry birds :D

Now this is something we can actually legitimately be excited about . Innovation and thinking outside of the box instead of more of the same.... Refreshing past models.

If RIM and Google partner, it is a win-win situation for both, RIM wants phone business and Google wants Ad business. Of course very bad for MS and Apple as the Android dev support explodes further. BES/BIS/QNX/Tat at the core will differentiate RIM from gazillion other Android sweatshops.

FTW much? Yes I do!

Sounds really cool! I've always been happy with the apps for the Blackberry, but i'm getting a little tired of hearing people defend their phones on the basis that "their apps are better". REALLY great idea!

Yes, RIM needs to make this happen. This would be hugh for RIM and put pressure on Apple. Both of which I would love to see happen.

What is the deal with angry birds? I played the game and think it stinks. Good ol american culture one person hypes something up and everone jumps on the bandwagon.

Of course it's a positive, who wouldn't want more App options.

I think that's great and all, but what about Google's take on this? I"m sure they won't just sit there and watch RIM take all their apps from them. We'll also have to see how that Oracle lawsuit goes through before we can get excited. We should also keep in mind that we won't be seeing the QNX OS get on a mobile device for a long while.

Somehow it sounds stupid to me...
I mean, Mike said at D:
"RIM, bla, bla... it´s STILL a buisness company... bla, bla... we don´t care about consumer devices, that´s thing that happend itself that a consumer... bla, bla, bla..."

So? Why are they going that way now?
Was it only an excuse for being behind?

Don´t get me wrong, that are great news - but the things Mike said and they do (after that) don´t fit.
Did he only say that, because he had no other excuse?!

BLACKBERRY SUCKS! NOW BB WANT OUR ANDROID APPS BECAUSE EVERYONE KNOW BLACKBERRY APPS ARE SIMPLE AND ANDROID & APPLE APPS LOOKS SO COOL.... BLACKBERRY PLEASE BE ORIGINAL!!!!!! NOW THEY WANT IPHONE APPS TOO?

This is not new news.

For me, the big unknown for the PlayBook is the ability to use the Bridge for internet/data connectivity (and not just PIN-related functions). Lack of that would make it easier for me to NOT spend the money on the PB right now (will likely down the road).

I do think this could help swing a lot of people to the PlayBook from at least other droid tabs. And perhaps some folks who were thinking of the iPad.

A good, bold (ha ha) move RIM!

Definitely a first for any platform without emulating a virtual environment via 3rd party software. This could be a huge step in the RIGHT direction, let's hope it's ON at launch

FTMFW!

That little android Dude don't look to happy.

Make it happen RIM.......Learn from Nokia's failures.......Give the people what they want

It's funny since everyone always makes fun of Android and Apple apps as 'toys' and 'for kids' and 'fart apps', yet here the same people are going squee about getting access to them.

I think this would be pretty cool. Being able to play some cross platform games with Android users would be nice. I'm a little concerned though because I hear a lot about android apps that actually have some malware inside of it. I never felt like i had to worry about that on my BlackBerry but if i'm downloading Android apps will i have to?

I can care less. The number of useful Android Apps are... pitiful to say the least. The only thing I've paid for is Trillian (available for Blackberries) and Beautiful Widgets (I'm going to go out on a limb and say Widgets are out...).

There isn't much else to buy.

I guess TouchDown would be a good candidate since RIM is afraid to build a decent Exchange client for their phones/tablet...

If they had said iOS apps I would have been incredibly... joyous..

But Android apps? Meh... They're crap anyways. Nothing to see here, moving along.

that would be awesome! i personally think the current blackberry apps are seriously lacking so this would be a major plus for me!

Bad thing is we won't see QNX on BB smartphones before 2012 will we?

Sounds great - so long as the pb will run the apps properly, the last thing RIM needs is - "I have that app on my andriod... Only it runs much faster and has no bugs" suddenly the pb will look like a large pile of pooh, even though it has awesome hardware... Beeeeeee careful RIM (as I'm sure they will be)

I think this is another feather in the blackberry cap. Now when everyone is like my droid is so much better cause of blah, blackberry can say we can do that and all of this better than your crappy phone book sized phone. This is great and I hope it becomes true.

This would be cool!

The consumer market loves fart apps & Angry Birds. Offer them a smartphone with an OS stability that Android lacks (sorry trolls, but Android 2.2 should barely qualify as a beta), long battery life and security of a Blackberry, coupled with their favorite games and fart apps and its pretty much a major win for BB.

I still can't believe RIM's naming of the PlayBook as I really don't see anything business-like in the name. Sounds like a toy which isn't what they're aiming for. Although BlackBook may sound a tad lame, it would fit it much better as a business device.

That sounds awesome. But the question is how the implementation would be coz BB phones are a different platform altogether. In Android itself we have so much fragmentation. So if we have BB phones theoretically able to run Android apps how would the experience be? Also would that stop software developers to code for the blackberry separately??

this will turn some heads towards the playbook surely

If they don't want to sink RIM would be wise to follow through

yikes yet another short term blow to the BB ecosystem. who in their right mind would spend any money now to develop any BB apps if in a year the RIM BAndroid :) phones can run android apps?

Any developer is going to build for iphone and android and then wait and see if they will build for BB...(of course as i write this I realized it is likely happening this way anyhow)

That'll be dope if this happened.

Interesting as Google just announced they are not happy with the sale of Google apps. BTW, can someone tell me again how an iPhone or Android phone is not a productive business device? Because I can assure you my storm 9530 is a PoC and entirely unproductive.

So Awesome. Cannot wait.

Buy RIMM and short Nokia

Android Apps are OK. There are a couple I've heard of that I want. BUT...

WHAT I REALLY WANT IS:

1. Copy Google's Speech-to-Text functionality that can be used just about anywhere.

2. Tether (for browsing, installing apps, downloading podcasts, Pandora and other internet Radio services) through an existing Blackberry, so I don't need to buy a second data plan.

Since the PlayBook hardware is locked down, I won't make hardware requests, but for future versions:

3. GPS that doesn't say, "Cannot get GPS signal" just before I am coming to a difficult intersection.

4. The ability to "hot swap" batteries, so I can keep going. (providing I remembered to put the spare in the charger.

I'm in the planning stage of adapting a shop management front end tool to a tablet format for a national automotive brand and this could make the platform decision simpler. Guess it won't be the iPad :-)

To say the truth: It's very very easy to port apps from android to BB QNX OS.

But it's impossible to load apps direct on android market...

This sounds too good to be true. I sure would like for it to happen though!

qnxforum.com
growing community for qnx related topics

Hehe...talking about what was in the sleeve. And the marathon continues. Look's like ppl at Mike's company are not as dumb as whiners have been stating lately. Looking forward to change my 9700 for a QNX smartphone, RIM! Keep up the GREAT work!

If they can simply add a jit to the kernel to run android apps.. Why not do it up?! Not only will it rock the android world, it will still be a blackberry!

For all those people saying, people will switch over to android or apple or windows, because blackberrys are so far behiend can go right ahead. What about all the features that other phones lack compared to blackberrys such as in BES, email, BBM, nice keyboard ect. which is why most people like blackberrys so much. Addidng android connectivity to the blackberrys is just a bonus for all those BB addicts, who will never switch regardless,

Just my 2 cents.

this is great... hope this happens.

SMART

I think it would be highly unlikely for RIM to allow Android apps on the Playbook - certainly not downloaded from Googles app store if such a thing were possible. Because by doing so they'd be handing a huge source of revenue to Google.

They could allow the apps to be uploaded to App World by Android developers. But that would mean using a variant of Googles JVM and SDKs which are clearly different to the custom JVM RIM currently uses. That's the licensed JVM with support for RIM's hardware (see below).

And SOME native apps might run on QNX. Assuming you have access to load them and provided they didn't use Google specific libraries. Not recommended if RIM wants to manage its platform.

Finally, RIM could use the Google JVM, but they'd be crazy to do so because Google has been hit with a massive patent violation penalty because of their JVM. There is no way Google will win Oracles patent suit because Google clearly breached the Java license. The cost will be immense. Just not sure who will pay it.

If RIM allowed Android apps to run on their devices they become irrelevant as a company so I doubt it will happen. If you buy BlackBerry its probably for BlackBerry features, not for Android apps that are likely as not to be available on BlackBerry anyway (or similar apps at least).

What would be much better is to provide cross compilers for Android Java code to make porting Google apps to BlackBerry much easier. You could do it for iPhone too if you felt so inclined.

That approach allows RIM to keep the own JVM and protects their platform from rogue code.

Don't know where Crackberry got this story but I doubt it was from a RIM developer.

That's greeeeaaaaaaat news ! I want that on the Dakota ôÔ

Yeah let Apple and Google battle it out for.....well whatever their beef is this week. We'll just stay on the right side of the RIM and watch the fight from our PlayBoox!

This would get Blackberry back to the fore front of the tech pages!! Blackberry has been forgotten in some of the best apps!

RIM needs it, or they will be buried ..going the Palm route.

Droiddddd

I like this monopoly RIM has adopted, there is nothing rewarding then giving your fans the ability to test the competition's apps on your own device. Given the shear power of the PlayBook, hopefully this move (if the final go is given) will turn some Android followers into BlackBerry PlayBook converts.

Huh?... What?... Android?.... Yes I'll take the evo please.

I wouldn't mind it. I currently have a DINC and a 9650 and it would be nice to have some of the Google apps on mg BB. Like a better GMail, Google Maps etc

While I agree that most of the apps in the Android market are pointless so are the ones in the iTunes store. However the good thing about this would be the amount of support they would most likely get from developers

Now what I REALLY want to see is BBM on Android. Each device has its own pin of sort so im sure it could be done.

Sigh. What a dumb speculation.

Dalvik is a tiny part of Android, created primarily to avoid paying royalties to Sun (now Oracle) for Java ME. Because, well, Android was meant to be free and paying royalties for every copy would make it impractical.

To port all of the Android layers that Dalvik actually needs in order to run apps would be a huge and pointless undertaking. It makes no sense whatsoever.

Notice that BGR was only told Dalvik might be used. The rest is just a wild and ridiculous speculation.

if Blackberry can run Android Apps its really a wonderful news, imagine the power of
Blackberry messaging capability and security with android multimedia prowess.

Look at the bigger picture. They are expanding their reach in a very competitive market and the bottom line is, that is great news. I will certainly move the Playbook up to the must consider list as the tablet race plays out for the next several months. Galaxy had a good lead until Zoom jumped out. Price ultimately pushed those back. PB can solve that issue. I'm all for it. No one is going to kill BB with a few gadgets. Especially when RIM can easily step on them with an adaptation such as this.

GOOD MOVE RIM! :-)

Wanting this Playbook thingy more and more, but I must say, the potential ability to run android apps on it would NOT be one of the attractions. Just like deciding in the end to get a Torch rather than an iPhone or Legend, etc, it's a decision which is based just as much on practical utilitarian factors ('how useful will this phone be for me in my job' is a pertinent question I asked myself) as it is on subjective stuff too. Mostly by the latter I mean the need to differentiate myself somehow from iPhone and Android mania. Yeah I know BlackBerry is merely a different fashion, but for me it feels less slavish. And that looks to be something of a common theme amongst BlackBerry users. So, RIM if you're contemplating enabling Android apps for the purposes of widening popularity, that might be a gamble you don't even need to take.

They should do this, now!

Give me a 4 inch, capacitive touch screen, dual core, 1GB of ram and lots of ROM BlackBerry running QNX with the Android Market, and I'll give you my money in a heartbeat.

Long Live the Fighters!...
Apple and Steve Jobs can bite me, meglomanic bastage!

The playbook is cool, but cost prohibitive for many, so is the torch. QNX running Android is like the old IBM Warp Running Win 3.1 apps, except there is no one stopping BB from doing it. for the phones, the tech specs need to be raised quite a bit, so you have headroom to run the things you want. BB combined with Android, would make it two to one against Apple. As as Blackberry users we would win, we are used to the BB Os, and get addition of Android. We also still get the support from BB, instead of the quaqmire of andoid companies.

If I was blackberry I would put as many developers I Could find behind closed doors, and work like mad men to make QNX solid as a rock running both, then release it to the other companies.

Just my two cents.