Following the announcement of BlackBerry® 7 at the BlackBerry® World™ conference, I’m pleased to announce that the BlackBerry® Java® SDK v7.0 is now available in beta!

This new version of the SDK also comes with simulators for the new BlackBerry® Bold™ 9900 series of smartphones, allowing you to test your applications against the latest and greatest. With the new BlackBerry Bold 9900 smartphone and BlackBerry® Bold™ 9930 smartphone on their way, you will have the tools you need to make sure your apps are running on these smartphones at launch. What’s more, the BlackBerry App World™ storefront is also accepting app submissions for these new devices! You now have the chance to be among the first to have your application submitted and ready for these exciting new products.

The BlackBerry Java Plug-in for Eclipse™ and the BlackBerry Java Development Environment have also both been updated to support the new OS version, featuring an abundance of new APIs. They’re all listed out in great detail in the “New in this Release” section of the Release Notes.

For more information on what developers need to know about BlackBerry 7 and to download the BlackBerry Java SDK v7.0 beta, check out the BlackBerry 7 landing page on BlackBerry Developer Zone.