Tech Thursday – Research in Motion Reveals New Blackberry OS

Still recovering from a crash of it's messaging servers I talked about last week, Blackberry owner Research in Motion, has revealed some details of it's new operating system for it's Playbook tablet and future Blackberry smart phones, that they say bridges the gap between Blackberry OS, at it's developers conference. But is it enough to help them over come their drop in sales and lost of market share?

Blackberry has been hit pretty good by Apple and Google thanks to their offerings in the smartphone market. RIM has seen sales drop almost every quarter. Then to compete and stay relevant in the game, they developed and released a tablet to take on the iPad and Google's Android tablets, but that tablet used a different operating system then the phones. With their new Blackberry BBX operating software, it will allow developers to write apps for new phones and the Playbook tablets and help "bridge a gap". Co-Chief Executive Officer Mike Lazaridis said “I can’t say how important you are to us” to the audience of developers in San Fransisco. He also said that "It’s a really exciting time for BlackBerry developers."

Developers have had a beta copy of the playbook software to start working on the apps, for some time, but no word yet on when the new BBX software will be coming out, or any word on news phones. That is the norm for many companies, due to the highly competitive business of smart phones. But those stumbling blocks, like the lack of a native email app for the Playbook, has made it hard for RIM to get into the game. They are hoping the new BBX software will help developers build better apps for it's products.

Now I have played with an early version of the QNX OS, which is what the new BBX is built on, back in my "hacker" days. It was very fun, fast and worked smoothly. I even liked the fact, that you could run it off one high density floppy. That's just 1.87 megabytes, where smartphones are sporting gigabytes of storage now. It didn't have much to it at the time, but I can understand why RIM bought it. I wouldn't say this will give them an edge, but it may help them get back on their way to not being a distant third in the smartphone race. The only one I can see that is farther behind, is Nokia. But then again, you don't have to be faster then the lion that wants to eat you, just faster then the other guys the lion is chasing.

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