Since my last post you must already know that I was porting Pop Corny to Blackberry. I can’t hide that I was really impressed by the way the platform is engineered. You know you have done something right when it allows a developer that had never even used the platform, come in and port his game in 2-3 days. But that, coupled with the fact that the game actually runs better than it does on the platform that is was originally written for, makes for something really impressive.

To showcase what I mean, I recorded a video with the game launching in parallel on both my iPad 2 and my Playbook. Since on both platforms the game actually achieves 60fps its hard to notice the difference in game, but the launch sequence really shows the difference. The bottom line is that given 2 devices with almost identical hardware (the same Dual-core 1 GHz Cortex-A9), running the same game, with the game optimized using the iOS device and only later ported to the Playbook, the Playbook manages to launch the app (load all textures, decompress them and upload to GPU, load sound effects, etc) 30% faster! In my book.. this is a huge achievement.

What is also amusing is how that 30% is calculated including the time the Playbook wastes doing “pre-launch” animations like pulling down the other app icons, pushing the app thumbnails left and the launching the actual app. And still managing to launch faster! It looks as it is mocking at the other device…!

Below is the actual video, and if you would like to get Pop Corny it is now available on App World here.