BlackBerry PlayBook Simulator adds support for the BlackBerry Browser

Research In Motion® is building an uncompromised browsing experiences on a tablet with support for the latest industry standards and technologies, including HTML5 and Adobe® Flash® 10.1.

Today, RIM announced that they have launched an updated version of the BlackBerry® Tablet OS simulator, which embeds the full BlackBerry Browser. With this updated simulator, their 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. For example, here is the User Agent for the BlackBerry® Torch™ 9800 smartphone and the User Agent for the upcoming BlackBerry PlayBook tablet.

BlackBerry Torch 9800 Smartphone User Agent

Mozilla/5.0 (BlackBerry; U; BlackBerry 9800; en) AppleWebKit/534.1+

(KHTML, Like Gecko) Version/6.0.0.141 Mobile Safari/534.1+

BlackBerry PlayBook Tablet User Agent

Mozilla/5.0 (PlayBook; U; RIM Tablet OS 1.0.0; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.8+

(KHTML, like Gecko) Version/0.0.1 Safari/534.8+

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. 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.