[chadbryant5]

Hi,

I've been a developer for years (web, rich client, enterprise aps), but new to mobile development. I've completed an iPhone app for someone and they want a Blackberry version now. I don't have a Blackberry, so I'm hoping I can do all my development using a simulator.

I have some basic questions. I've ordered a book to get started, but thought I'd get some idea of what I'm up against from those of you who are experienced Blackberry developers.

My iPhone app allows the user to attach a photo (take a new photo or access their photos previously taken) and then get a reference to this photo which can later be submitted along with other information via an http post to a backend web server.

In addition, the user enters an address. The iPhone SDK makes it easy to use the core location api to get the user's latitude and longitude coords. based on current location using GPS. With these coordinates, the built in google maps api is easy to use to get the address from those coordinates.

So I'm just curious what I'm up against trying to do these things on a Blackberry. Any insights about how easy or hard this will be would be greatly appreciated. Any Blackberry model would need to be supported... the end user's Blackberry used would be unknown, so the app would have to work on most or all Blackberrys... at least newer models.

So to summarize, these are the main features I'll need to build into my Blackberry app:

1. Access camera and/or photo library on the phone to get a reference to a photo to transmit to a backend server. The user will enter a incident description, but a photo is desired along with a text description.

2. GPS to lookup current location and get the address for that location. This saves the user from having to enter the address if they are currently at the location of the incident. They can just tap a button and the address is filled in for them based on their current location. Very easy to do on the iPhone, not sure about Blackberry.

3. Posting the image and other details to a backend web server. I do an http post on the iPhone. I just need a way to do this on the blackberry...so anyway it can get transmitted to a backend server where it can be automatically populated into a database is what I need.

Thanks for your ideas, tips, etc. If you have any good learning resources to recommend those are welcome too (ie books, sites, eBooks, etc).

Thanks in advance! I'm excited to start my Blackberry development journey.

Chad