I know a couple of guys who worked on a trip tracking app for Blackberry. They collected GPS readings out of RIM devices and displayed them on web pages so you

I know a couple of guys who worked on a trip tracking app for Blackberry. They collected GPS readings out of RIM devices and displayed them on web pages so you could easily tag your trips etc. They supported Blackberry and from what I heard from one of their dev's, it was a huge pain. The toolchain was just plain crappy. Lots of convoluted API calls, lots of incompatibilities between different versions of firmware and lots of weird bugs that were sometimes traced back to the libraries themselves. RIM also decided to create their own markup for "widgets" and they completely ignored web standards. It was all highly complex, convoluted and proprietary. RIM was also providing zero help in distribution and marketing. The startup eventually failed and the whole experience left a bitter taste in everyone's mouths. If this is an indication of the current RIM developer ecosystem, I would bet much that they'll be able to change the environment in the next 6 months. After playing with Apple's iPhone SDK, I can see why everyone's so excited. It's extremely dev friendly and a lot more fun to use (also, you avoid Java). The app store is huge and will make marketing and distribution of apps so much easier.