During the BlackBerry Developer Conference (BBDevCon) Asia last week, we managed to be part of the media joining the press interview with Research In Motion (RIM), discussing the future of Mobile and where BlackBerry is headed.

1. Near Field Communication

In case you haven’t heard, near field communications (NFC) is a hot technology right now and a number of influential companies are betting that it’s going to play a prominent role in our lives in the future. Widi Sugijono of inTouch Wireless Indonesia represents one such company, who mentioned that mobile will increasingly move towards NFC. Essentially, NFC is a set of standards for smartphones and similar devices to establish radio communication with each other by touching them together or bringing them into close proximity, usually no more than a few centimetres. NFC will increasingly be a popular choice for users because of its ease of use and hence, next generation smartphones will be equipped with NFC chips. NFC chips are commonly used for contactless payment and serve as a mobile wallet and we will soon be able to leave house without our wallet. NFC could also be integrated with out public transportation payment system. Most importantly, NFC also enables data exchange between 2 devices such as business cards or file exchanges. This will change the way we interact with each other in the near future.

2. Cloud Computing

According to both Paul Burnett, Senior Worldwide Evangelist for the Creative Solutions Business Unit at Adobe Systems Incorporated, and Thomas Kang, Strategy Analyst of Global Wireless Practice, the future of mobile will be increased integration with cloud computing. Smartphones will increasingly move to the direction where more storage will be stored on cloud rather than the phone and hence the processing power will be offloaded to the cloud. Applications can be more powerful because it leverages on the cloud, and this is why Adobe is launching Adobe Creative Cloud soon and will be fully supported on the BlackBerry 10 operating system. Thomas coined the term web 3.0 for this mobile integration with the cloud. Search engines will become more intelligent and more personalized and more location based. Smartphones will also have connectivity capability to other appliances such as television and car. Essentially, this could happen: You are taking the MRT back from work, you are reading your work email on your mobile while downloading the latest episode of the Big Bang Theory, storing it onto the cloud. When you are home, you watch the episode from your TV at home, accessing the media file from your phone. Life is good.

3. Mobile vs Tablet vs Notebook

With tablets now in the picture, more and more devices will be demanding our attention. What does this mean for the smartphone market? With smartphone users changing into tablet, heavy media consumption are moved to tablets. Various uses are offloaded to different devices. According to Thomas, in the next three years, the number of tablets will surpass notebooks in the worldwide market.

“Of first-time tablet users in America, about 75 per cent of them are not smart-phone users. While the time spent watching video on smart phones by smart-phone users who also had a tablet dramatically dropped from the average of two hours to less than 30 minutes. The main features they still heavily use on smartphones, even though they may have a tablet, are e-mail checking and navigating,” said Kang.

What has all these got to do with BlackBerry?

New generation BlackBerry smartphones will be equipped with NFC chips, and BlackBerry will provide support for developers who wants to build on the BlackBerry Platform. As the platforms for application development evolves constantly, BlackBerry will adopt HTML5 as the standard for their application development. However, this does not mean that BlackBerry does not support other languages but in fact, support all major platforms that developers build their applications on such as Android or Flash. BlackBerry makes developing on the BlackBerry 10 platform easy because, according to the VP of Developers Relations Alec Saunders, startup developers should spend their time focusing on building the product but not learning new languages. Hence, with the BlackBerry 10 platform which is an open source and open platform, this creates opportunities for developers to get started quickly with all the support readily available.

“At RIM, we aim to be the best possible business partners for startup. For other platforms out there such as iOS which do not provide the support and open source code, RIM will provide the tablet, education, and source code for any developers out there who wants to build on our platform. Need a tablet? Call us. Need help? Call us,” said Alec Saunders. To stressed further how RIM is now more approachable to developers, Alec readily shared his email address at the conference. If you are a developer on the BlackBerry platform or looking to venture onto the BlackBerry platform and need some help, do drop Alec an email at alec.saunders[at]rim[dot]com. Do let us know if you were able to get the help that you need, we are definitely interested to find out more about this new RIM approach to the developer community.

As applications slowly move towards SoLoMo (Social, Local, and Mobile), developers would be more enticed with the platform that is easy to build on, has wide open source support available and a huge community of developer. The BlackBerry platform seems to provide for condition one and two, but lacking in condition three as compared to other platforms such as Android and iOS. Let’s see how far can BlackBerry go with the Asia market, and things are looking very promising already.