Mike Lazaridis, Co-CEO of Research in Motion, announced the next generation BlackBerry platform — BBX, at the BlackBerry DevCon 2011 Americas in San Francisco, US. The new BBX will combine the best elements of the BlackBerry OS platform with the best of QNX platform. This new operating system will bring HTML5 based, WebWorks based and even Android based applications to work on the BBX supporting hardware.
At the BlackBerry DevCon 2011, the RIM executives announced the next generation BBX will offer developers enough flexibility to leverage from the variety of the developmental libraries. The POSIX-complaint environment offering BBX will bring several eye-candy like effects within the applications and also feature intense gaming promise.
Lazaridis stated that the QNX architecture is safe by design and it does not compromise the multi-core performance in real-time. Basically, the integration of BlackBerry OS and QNX is being dubbed as BBX. The current breed of apps that are compatible and created using the WebWorks as well as HTML5 will run smoothly on the BBX platform.
To create compelling applications, RIM has announced the availability of the Native Development Kit for PlayBook and also BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0 beta which also includes the BlackBerry Runtime for Android Apps as well as support for Adobe AIR 3.0.
Ideaworks Game Studio’s Marmalade platform was ported for the BlackBerry Playbook and enabled running some of the heavy PC games like Dead Space and Lara Croft and the Guardian Light. One can expect some recent and popular PC gaming titles to hit the PlayBook by end of this year or early next year. Besides that, BlackBerry has offered new Scoreloop SDK for the developers to add more social elements in the games that would be developed for the BBX platform. The BBX OS will support advanced graphics through the BlackBerry Cascades UI framework.
Though majority of announcements are focussed mostly towards the developers, here’s what consumers can expect from BBX — computing real-time with high multi-core performance, advanced graphics support, better looking applications and capability to use Android apps. The BBX will be used for both smartphones and the tablets.