I am new to Blackberry programming and starting my first app soon. I believe I will be supporting OS 4.5 and higher, but now need to decide which JDE to use. I want to support the most amount of phones as possible, which is why I would guess 4.5 and higher is a good cutoff. Can anyone make suggestions of what JDE is best for features and support? I know that is very subjective. Is there a site even that lists the features of each JDE to make a good decision?
If you can, I'd go down to 4.3 as the cutoff. There are still a lot of devices out there running 4.3. There aren't too many things that the 4.5 API can do that 4.3 can't, so you don't really gain much by setting your minimum level at 4.5. I wouldn't go lower than 4.3, unless you want really ugly fonts!
Keep in mind that even if you pick 4.3 as your base version, you'll still need to create a separate build for touchscreen devices (Storm) using the 4.7 because that's where the touch APIs were introduced.