Android may be an open source operating system, but it’s not as open as other platforms according to a new research report from VisionMobile. The research firm compared Android, Eclipse, Firefox, the Linux kernel, MeeGo, Qt and Symbian and found that, of those open source environments, Android was the least “open.” According to the report’s “open governance index,” which scored each environment on how open it is, Android scored a 23%. It was far below the others; Eclipse sc...

Yesterday, RIM released an update to its Java and web-based development tools for the BlackBerry platform, a move which RIM says will: “provide new capabilities that make it even easier to create feature-rich applications.” The new and updated SDKs include: BlackBerry Java Plug-In for Eclipse v1.1, BlackBerry Web Plug-in v2.0, BlackBerry Widget SDK v1.0, and BlackBerry Java SDK v5.0 — RIM boasts that the updates will provide access to over 20,000 native APIs. We’ve got the official pre...

We’ve already talked about some of the news from the first day of the 2009 BlackBerry Developers Conference, but another blast of PR from RIM has hit out inboxes, and wow, are we ever excited. The biggest news of the day is that developers will finally be able to unlock the full potential of the latest generation of BlackBerry smartphones — OS 5.0 and hardware permitting, of course — with the latest beta of the Java SDK 5.0 thanks in part to its OpenGL ES support. Still, there’s a lot ...