BlackBerry launches its new os RIM's BBX

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

BlackBerry launches its new os RIM's BBX

Research in Motion offered some details of that BBX platform at its BlackBerry DevCon Americas conference in San Francisco.

BBX is said to power both BlackBerry smartphones and tablets, and support the company's cloud services. It appears that BBX will "support applications developed using any of the tools available for the BlackBerry PlayBook, including native SDK, Adobe AIR/Flash and WebWorks/HTML5, as well as the BlackBerry Runtime for Android Apps." , according to a statement released by the company.

RIM's PlayBook tablets are already powered by a variation of QNX, for which the company introduced the developer beta of its Blackberry PlayBook OS 2.0. That beta offers developers the skill to harbor Android applications onto the tablets a tactical move that carries some risks for RIM. Whereas it could add to the popularity of the platform, by huge expanding ecosystem of apps available, it also risks alienating those developers who put so much time and effort into developing BlackBerry apps.

RIM presented a few details about BlackBerry BBX's user interface or release date, which is a sharp contrast to some other recent conferences, such as Microsoft's BUILD, which presented a detailed drill-down into a future platform with the presentation of hardware loaded with same.

Mike Lazaridis, president and co-CEO of RIM, made a statement in the conference,"At DevCon today, we're giving developers the tools they need to build richer applications and we're providing direction on how to best develop their smartphone and tablet apps as the BlackBerry and QNX platforms converge into our next generation BBX platform."

A Native SDK for the BlackBerry PlayBook was also introduced by RIM that will enable developers with "build high-performance, multi-threated, native C/C++ applications and enables developers to create advanced 2D and 3D games and other apps with access to OpenGL ES 2.0 and Open AL.". Applications developed through that Native SDK are actually compatible with tablets and smartphones running BBX.

Along with that, RIM is approaching BlackBerry WebWorks SDK 2.2 for smartphones and tablets, for building HTML5 apps with native capabilities, and Open Source libraries for the PlayBook platform.

It's a gamble for RIM that its new generation of BBX products will allow it to battle against the Apple iPhone and Google Android, which is dominating huge chunks of the mobility market and even jeopardized BlackBerry's established standing among enterprise customers. RIM is depending on a revived line of BlackBerry smartphones running BlackBerry 7 OS to retain market-share, until those devices reach store shelves