"It occurred to me that the perfect manufacturer, brand
and partner for Android devices already exists: Research In Motion.
"There is of course, the issue that RIM already has it’s
own software platform, the BlackBerry OS, which has been under
development for about 8 years.
"While Android is Linux based, and Blackberry is completely
proprietary, both share quite a bit in common from the developer
perspective, in that the applications are written in Java. There
are of course some religious differences as to how Java is
implemented on both systems — BlackBerry uses a licensed
derivative of the Sun J2ME JVM and version 4.x implements a subset
of MIDP 2.0, whereas Android’s Dalvik is an Open Source
re-implementation of Java that uses a unique Google-developed
bytecode that is incompatible with that of J2ME, so it cannot be
certified as “true” Java. Nevertheless, from a
developer perspective, the two systems are very similar in terms of
skill sets that are needed to create software that would run on
either device."
