In the past days the mobile developers community got the announcement about a new partnership between Nokia and Microsoft that would use their complementary strengths and expertise to create a new global mobile ecosystem.
The main aspects of this strategic partnership from a developer point of view are that Nokia would adopt Windows Phone as its principal smartphone strategy and that Nokia would help drive the future of Windows Phone contributing
to it with its expertise on hardware design, language support, etc. On the other side Microsoft will bring a consistent expertise about Operating Systems and a good toolbox full of development tools.

There are a lot of developers that believe this step is a very desperate move to stay in business and admitting that Nokia isn’t in any way capable of creating an attractive smartphone eco-system, moreover there is a general
sense of frustration between the ones that has invested a lot of time and money following the Nokia strategies and created products for the Nokia platform.
The feeling we have about this partnership are different, we believe the decision was not because of today, was because of Nokia in the next years. What we see right now on the market is that Blackberry is consolidating a partnership
with Adobe for the new playbook, google is working in the same direction to improve even more their app market place and the Apple is quite solid and is trying to became a mobile operator.
Create a strong relationship with a company like Microsoft doesn’t seem a bad solution also because Nokia demonstrated more than once to trust and support the developer community so it’s still possible to have a Qt porting (I don´t
know what Microsoft thinks about it) and to force Microsoft to include some of the Nokia-related tools up to today (Flash Player at least).

Some years ago the Flash Platform developers community have had the same feeling about Adobe and Macromedia. Adobe did one great marketing effort to demonstrate it was a marriage, right now most of the developers are happy about the marriage
but not all of them.
It’s too early to get the right feeling, again it’s something that is up to the high level management, the important is that there is the need for clarity about tools and developers program like Forum Nokia, after we got some clarifications we will be able to follow up and state if it’s a funeral or a marriage.

Research In Motion® have just released an updated version of the BlackBerry® Tablet OS simulator, which embeds the full BlackBerry Browser. With this updated simulator, the web development community can now start testing their web applications and Adobe Flash applications to ensure that they fully support the upcoming BlackBerry PlayBook tablet at launch.

As a web developer, there are a couple of items you should know about the BlackBerry Browser running on the BlackBerry Tablet OS:

1) The User Agent will continue to match the current User Agent pattern that we use with our smartphone products.

2) The browser builds on the existing support for web standards such as HTML5 for BlackBerry by adding support for HTML5 Video and Audio, based on the power and flexibility of the underlying BlackBerry Tablet OS. The simulator does not support all codecs and some audio/video testing will require hardware to fully test. The browser supports Adobe Flash 10.1, and Adobe Flash developers will be able to test the Adobe Flash player in the simulator.

It really seems that this new upcoming device will be strictly related to Flash because RIM officially said “We will continue to work closely with Adobe to enhance Adobe Flash implementation as we lead up to launch, and we appreciate feedback from the community on your experiences with the Adobe Flash player and browsing experience overall“. A device like this one can be really a competitor of the iPad especially because people will be free to get the amazing content and application built upon the Flash Platform.

You can download the simulator here.