RIM has announced a number of updates, rewards, hardware on offer and revenue commitments to help drive momentum among developers ahead of the BB10 launch.

The company is working with Appcelerator to offer its network of 390,000 developers financial rewards, free services and hardware for creating apps for Blackberry 10.

The first 1,000 will receive a BlackBerry test device when their app has been approved. Up to 10,000 will receive one year Appcelerator Cloud Services for free. Others can qualify for the BlackBerry 10k Developer Commitment, where certified apps are considered for a $10,000 reward.

Appcelerator’s cross-platform development product, Titanium, can be used by devs to build or port their apps from other operating systems, reusing between 65 and 90 per cent of the code. Appcelerator says that Titanium can speed up dev time by 70 per cent. It will be on pre-release from 7 December.

BlackBerry is also working with Mippin on the App Generator which turns online content, including Rss feeds, Facebook pages and blogs into native apps for Blackberry. Apps built for BlackBerry OS 5, OS 6, OS 7 and the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet include social sharing functionality, including BlackBerry Messenger integration, as well as being automatically portable to be BlackBerry 10-ready.

Developers testing their applications on BlackBerry test devices can now apply to be eligible for a limited edition BlackBerry 10 device – the deadline for applying is January 21, 2013 and developers must have an app approved on BlackBerry World.

BlackBerry 10 also has an updated SDK available in beta from today. It will come out of beta into full launch on 11 December 2012.