RIM just posted on their official Developer Blog that they will be covering the new developer features in BlackBerry 6 in the coming weeks. With rumors that the BlackBerry 9800 running OS 6.0 stating that it will be released as early as next week this has us truly wondering…

WHERE ARE THE DEVELOPER TOOLS?!?

I have been asked by quite a few developers how RIM expects them to prepare for BlackBerry 6 without providing them any tools to do so. I realize that a select few have been given access to the tools through RIM’s Alliance program but I thought RIM was moving away from the closed door development environment. I truly hope that RIM will release or at the very least announce some developer tools for OS 6.0 next week at their event. Otherwise if the BlackBerry 9800 truly does launch in mid-August we are going to have some disgruntled developers. I really hate to rain on RIM’s great build up to the release of BlackBerry 6 but why don’t they show some love to developers too?

In their blog post Mike does mention that they will be covering JAVA and web development in two separate tracks. They plan on highlighting the new user interface controls, Universal Search, and Barcode Capture API which sounds pretty interesting. For the web they will be covering HTML5 (I can’t wait) and CSS3. They also promise to “Redefine” BlackBerry widgets which I hope translates into “Make them actually useful without restricting them to obscurity.”

Once RIM finally gets to releasing BlackBerry 6 expect us to totally revamp our mobile site to take advantage of it! I cannot wait to finally be able to use HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS3!