Research in Motion Co-CEO Mike Lazaridis announced Blackberry’s new operating system BBX its integration with the QNX platform which already powers the Playbook. This news was expected since BlackBerry’s move towards QNX has been clear for over a year.
BBX has a high level of security, which you would expect from RIM, so you’ll find support for Security Certification EAL4+, IEE POSIX certification, and IEC 61508 Safety (SIL3). Meanwhile there’s a UI developed by RIM-acquired The Astonishing Tribe (TAT), which has been responsible for BBX’s Cascades UI Framework for advanced graphics.
Since games are the most downloaded apps in their app store BBX will support 2D and 3D gaming. There were a few gaming demo’s which we caught on camera, which you can be sure we’ll be updating this post with them once we get them edited. We got to check out Robotos and Lara Croft: Guardian of Light.
Developers will be able to code using regular C++ and then bring their apps to BBX using RIM’s developer toolkit. Any WebWorks and HTML5 apps developed for current BlackBerry devices will also work on BBX, as well as software developed using any of the tools available today for the PlayBook, including Native SDK, Adobe AIR/Flash and WebWorks/HTML5. Finally, there’ll be support for the BlackBerry Runtime for Android Apps, on both tablets and future RIM smartphones.
Finally there are so-called “Super Apps” which, RIM says, will allow for advanced capabilities such as deeper integration between apps, push services, social integration and more. The big example was Citrix that showed off a live Windows desktop that was integrated into the Playbook UI which ran like an app. It was pretty impressive.
In order to maintain their developer community it seems that Blackberry is casting a very wide net, HTML5 is being pushed as an industry standard for developers and we’re keen to learn more about the Blackberry Runtime for Android. Stay tuned for more news fronm BlackBerry Devcon 2011.
