Roundup: the best new BlackBerry apps at WES 2010

News
By Mary Branscombe
published

If you get the new Pearl 3G with 25MB of memory, what are the new business apps you’ll want on it?

PrivacyStar is trying to tackle unwanted phone calls. You can automatically block calls from anyone who's not in your address book or anyone who's hiding their phone number. You can block specific numbers and when you do, you can report them for calling your number if you've registered it as not wanting marketing calls. Initially PrivacyStar is launching the US but developer First Orion is planning a version for the UK and Europe soon.

If you want to develop your own mobile business apps, Oracle used WES 2010 to announce the developer preview of the Oracle Application Development Framework mobile client for its 11g Fusion Middleware, which you can use to create BlackBerry clients for Oracle business apps as native Java apps.

"I'm not legally allowed to say when it will go into production," chief architect for middleware Ted Farrell commented, "but we have a big show later this year."

Domino users aren't left out. Kryos Systems launched the beta of its Velocity Designer for rapid development of BlackBerry apps that connect to Notes and Domino databases. Again, this will launch in the summer.

Mary Branscombe
Mary Branscombe

Mary is a freelance business technology journalist who has written for the likes of ITPro, CIO, ZDNet, TechRepublic, The New Stack, The Register, and many other online titles, as well as national publications like the Guardian and Financial Times. She has also held editor positions at AOL’s online technology channel, PC Plus, IT Expert, and Program Now. In her career spanning more than three decades, the Oxford University-educated journalist has seen and covered the development of the technology industry through many of its most significant stages.

Mary has experience in almost all areas of technology but specialises in all things Microsoft and has written two books on Windows 8. She also has extensive expertise in consumer hardware and cloud services - mobile phones to mainframes. Aside from reporting on the latest technology news and trends, and developing whitepapers for a range of industry clients, Mary also writes short technology mysteries and publishes them through Amazon.