Not only will today almost certainly go down as the day when Ice Cream Sandwich was formally debuted, but RIM has its own smartphone operating system news to share, announcing the QNX-based BBX at its DevWorld conference today.
Earlier this month, the name “BBX” leaked thanks to a slide at a QNX event, and now RIM has confirmed it. BBX will power the company’s future smartphones, departing from the BlackBerry OS 7, as used on current models. RIM got its start with QNX on the PlayBook, and is building off that experience with BBX, integrating features from QNX and previous BBOS releases.
So far, the list of what we can expect in BBX includes the BlackBerry Cascades UI and the introduction of “super apps”, which RIM is using to describe apps built around network services like BBM and that are heavily integrated with each other. There are a lot of specifics we’d like to know more about, and hopefully we will as the release of the first BBX device approaches.
Developers are being recruited to develop for BBX with the promise of easy access thanks to HTML5, and POSIX certification to give them a familiar starting point.
We’ve heard that a smartphone known as the BlackBerry Colt will be the first model released running BBX. Some rumors had it for a 2012 release, while others anticipated its arrival before the end of 2011.
