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I am deciding between which library to use for development: jQuery Mobile or Sencha Touch. The application I am building will specifically target enterprise (Fortune 500) BlackBerries. The application will not require any hardware features, but the user experience/UI rendering should be as good as possible.

I am not familiar with BlackBerry OS adoption/upgrade statistics so I don't know what platform is my lowest common denominator. Are most enterprise users on BlackBerry 6+ or 5+ or 4+? I just don't know and I don't know where to find those statistics. What is your recommendation?

Michael Donohue
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Andrew
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In my opinion the first step should be studying the audience of your future application. What model do they use, do they use the most recent models, or they tend to keep working with old models.

The main point is that RIM stops releasing device software for old BlackBerry models. For instance for BlackBerry 8800 the most recent available device OS version is 4.5 But your customer may have a lot of empolyees who use this device.

Devices with device OS version 4+, but before 5.0, do not work properly with complex html/javascript pages.

In version 5.0 there was implemented better support for complex html/javascript functionality in your applications.

Conclusion: If your potential customers are not using old devices, then start supporting device OS versions 5+, otherwise use SDK version 4.x according to the target devices.

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As best practice, I would jump into learning and developing for the latest Operating System, which would be 6. I know all of our customers are working on Bolds a Torches, which means they'd be using 6.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlackBerry#Operating_system

Additionally, I would look into creating Adobe AIR applications. They work for Application 6 and Playbooks as well.

http://us.blackberry.com/developers/started/bbdevapproach.jsp

Dan B. Lee
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  • You mentioned your customers are all on 6. How would you describe your customers? enterprise? which industry? – Andrew Jul 28 '11 at 17:56
  • I have 700 users with Blackberries or Torches, all connected to various Blackberry Enterprise Servers, depending on their location. We do have some customers attached to the BES with Curves, but these are personal devices that we didn't purchase for them. The 700 that support are all for Financial Firms (Real Estate, High Risk Clean Energy Investments, Credits, Bonds, etc.) – Dan B. Lee Jul 28 '11 at 18:04
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You will likely found RIM's own "Choosing a target OS" page helpful. It has stats on current active devices as well as narrowing down to those devices that use the AppWorld.

Scott W
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  • It's not really all that helpful to me since it's not very specific. I mean you can't tell the difference between an enterprise executive on the latest and greatest vs. a high schooler on a hand-me-down, or if it's the other way around and the high schooler has the newest and the enterprise hasn't upgraded in years. – Andrew Jul 28 '11 at 17:51
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    Then you may have to survey your customers / potential customers. Or, look at the features you need and see which OS level is required to get those features. Specific to the web, the browser prior to OS6 is quite limited. And even OS6 is not so good when compared to other mobile platforms. – Scott W Jul 28 '11 at 18:03