Originally Posted by
Joel S. You ever try running incorrect drivers on your computer? It's not pretty. They may be similar hardware wise, but they won't be identical.
Although 5.0 is going to be more unified, they still need to account for the differences in hardware (especially input) somewhere. Considering how finite space is, I'm not sure they'd package the software that controls all the various types of input on each device.
BBOS at its heart is nothing more than JAVA. As such, it has no drivers like you would see in Windows or Mac or Linux. Thats good, for RIM because it makes having such a large base of devices easy to program and easy to keep compliant with what we know as the Blackberry experience. Input is simply a 0 or a 1 switch, nothing more or less across the platform. Lets use the dreaded Iphone, another Java system as and example. 1 switch for light touch, 1 switch for telling whether or not its a light touch or a hard push, 1 switch for hard push. That is easily translatable to touch screen or click screen. Inputs are different, switches are the same. It also translates closely to wether you are moving around with a touch of the screen or a roll of the trackball if you move from the touchscreen devices and the trackball devices.
Also remember, our current screens are already capable of what is being talked about. Yet another simple change of a software switch. Its a little different for that on the communications side, but not much. Just enough to make the current OS's incompatible from device to device.
What I was saying is that I don't think there is going to be any difference in the basic hardware ie. radio's, cpu, memory type etc., therefore it will probably be compatible though maybe they will bump up clock speeds. That would not make a difference. There may be additional hardware ie. wifi but that is already supported in the core OS. Of course this is all just conjecture, could be wrong.
