Question

i’ve been poking around RIM’s PlayBook SDK and noticed they extend Object on a lot of their classes.

are there benefits to extending Object on a custom class that would normally be unextended?

package qnx.notificationManager
{
    public class Notification extends Object
    {
    ...

Answer 1

If you do not specify that your class extends another class, the compiler automatically makes your class extend Object. So the answer is that you don’t gain any benefit; they must have just been trying to be explicit, or maybe the code was generated through decompilation.