While the fact that RIM would be using QNX for its future smartphones and tablets is now quite official, details about the future of the platform are scarce. However, at the BlackBerry DevCon Americas conference, the company revealed a few things about its plans, without actually showing off the new OS, or mentioning a tentative release date.
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The new OS will be called BBX, be a combination of QNX and BlackBerry OS interfaces, feature support for BlackBerry cloud services, and be meant for both tablets and smartphones. BBX will support applications developed using the tools available for the BlackBerry PlayBook, including its native SDK beta, Adobe AIR/Flash, WebWorks/HTML5, and the BlackBerry Runtime for Android Apps.
Mike Lazaridis, co-CEO of RIM, spoke about new platform, and the fate of developers:
“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.”
The company has also released a 1.0 gold release of the native SDK for the BlackBerry PlayBook, which will apparently allow developers ability to build “high-performance, multi-threaded, 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.” As with the beta native SDK, any applications created with the new native SDK will be compatible with BBX. Also new, is the BlackBerry WebWorks SDK 2.2 for smartphones and tablets, which will help developers create HTML5 apps with native integration, as well as Open Source libraries.