The company offers WebWorks in addition to its native BlackBerry development environment because many mobile developers don't want to learn new programming tools to write apps for each vendor's platform, Smith said. James Pearce, senior director of developer relations at framework vendor Sencha, agreed with that view and said Web-based tools are a good common denominator.

"The Web is a crazy thing to bet against," Pearce said.

Using standard Web-based technologies is a smart strategy for RIM, which is unlikely to attract the kind of following that the iPhone and Android platforms have built up among developers, said IDC analyst Will Stofega. It lowers the hurdles to getting into BlackBerry development, which could encourage more developers to write for BlackBerry phones and the PlayBook, he said.

There are more than 19,000 applications in the BlackBerry App World store now, and about 35 million mobile users have downloaded apps so far, with a current rate of about 2 million downloads per day, Smith said. But that pales in comparison to Apple's iPhone App Store, which has more than 300,000 apps available, and the Android Market, which . The iPhone App Store recently celebrated its 10 billionth download. AndroLib recently estimated the Android Market has had 2.5 billion downloads.

The IDG News Service