Ah yes, I'm well acquainted with the simulator. Unfortunately, the reboot time was on par with that of a physical device which lead me to the drastic measure of

Ah yes, I'm well acquainted with the simulator. Unfortunately, the reboot time was on par with that of a physical device which lead me to the drastic measure of snapshotting a running simulator inside of virtual box since I could boot virtual box in 20% of the time it took to start a fresh simulator. The simulator is also throttled to a paltry 10k/sec when performing network access (why?!), and the app I was working on was for music streaming which forced me to do most of my testing on physical devices. Regarding the connection factory, I was aware of it; however, given the market share of older devices, it makes sense to support them. If you're going to do so, you're going to have to roll your own connection code since older devices can't use newer OS versions. I'm not talking about ancient devices either. The Curve 8900 shipped with the 4.6 which doesn't support the connection factory. In our case, it didn't make sense to have two builds (legacy and modern) since we'd have to support legacy anyway. I suspect this will improve as the older devices disappear by way of attrition, but it made things difficult at the time. Regarding the people willing to spend money on software, we never applied to get into the marketplace; however, all of RIM's competitors have similar offerings, so I see no advantage here.