BlackBerry NDK Available This Summer

At the same time as RIM dropped this bombshell news, the company also announced that its BlackBerry Tablet OS Native Development Kit (NDK) will be going into open beta this summer, and will be demonstrated at BlackBerry World this May in Orlando. The NDK is currently in limited alpha release. With the NDK, developers will be able to construct multi-threaded, native C/C++ applications using standard GNU applications. This will make it easy to bring work done in standard C/C++ into the BlackBerry Tablet OS environment.

Depending upon how this works in practice, RIM's shrewd move to support Android apps could prove a huge boon in the ongoing tablet wars. We'll know soon enough how it's implemented: The BlackBerry PlayBook ships on April 19.