Can I program the BL600 with Nordic’s BLE stack and our own applications, bypassing smartBASIC?

You can use the BL600 as a blank hardware module and interface directly with the nRF51822 chip. The tradeoffs for doing this mean that you lose the capabilities of smartBASIC but does mean you can load applications written using the Nordic SDK to the BL600 hardware. Laird will fully support our BL600 hardware but for software support you will need to contact Nordic. More information can be found in the application note “Developing Low Energy Applications with Eclipse and GCC for BL600," which is available on an as-needed basis by contacting our support team.