Completing RIM's keynote sessions at BlackBerry DevCon Europe 2012 was Chris Smith, veep, application platform and tools.

Highlighting features of the forthcoming PlayBook 2.0 OS, plus the BlackBerry 10 platform, the majority of his talk focused on general app development.

However there was a section specifically about games and the native C/C++ SDK that's now available for PlayBook.

"PlayBook 2.0 and BB10 enables console-quality games on a mobile device," he stated, also pointing to the potential for social gaming that will be made available through the BBM and Scoreloop integration in the 2.0 upgrade thanks due in February or March.

Hopefully, we'll learn more about those particular elements in the afternoon sessions.

Bittersweet

As for current development tools, Smith invited Alex Caccia, CEO of UK middleware company Marmalade to the stage.

He highlighted some of the games that had been created using the Marmalade framework, which supports a wide range of mobile and now TV platforms.

"We were the first native SDK to support PlayBook," Caccia pointed out.

Game that were demoed included Backbreaker 2 Vengeance, which was developed by its sister outfit Ideaworks, and ZeptoLab's Cut the Rope, which uses Scoreloop for its social network.

Another Marmalade-developed title doing well on PlayBook is Artofbytes' Grave Defense HD.

"It's a good example of why developers should work on new platform as the game is very popular on App World but it got lost a little on other stores," Caccia said.

More than a browser

Something else that Smith discussed, if briefly, was HTML5.

"We are committed to leading support for HTML5," he stated.

"Everything we do supports cross-platform standards and we will have unparallel support for HTML5 on PlayBook 2.0 OS."

His vision was that developers could use HTML5 as a hybrid technology; it providing a distribution layer and basic functionality that could be enriched with Javascript, CSS, and integration with native apps and services such as BBM.

"It's about taking HTML5 beyond the browser," he said.