Blackberry HTML 5 BBX mobile operating system announced

It doesn’t exactly take a genius to work out that Blackberry products aren’t doing as well as they were two years ago, and with the very recent server crash (hint, they needed sun disk arrays) which resulted in thousands of Blackberry users unable to use some functions on their smartphone, Blackberry is hoping to lift spirits with the announcement of a new mobile operating system, named BBX.

The new mobile operating system will be a hybrid-cross between QNX as seen on the Playbook tablet and BlackBerry OS as featured on smartphones. The new operating system will also be cross platform and in the future should be running on both Blackberry tablets and smartphones alike, and it’ll be heavily focused on HTML5 and marketed at business users in the early part of its life-cycle. Blackberry is keen to stress that they are focusing solely on HTML 5 for the future, meaning that apps which run in Javascript will become inept (doh!). A keen thing to also note with BBX is that Blackberry are also putting a lot of effort in to 3D gaming frameworks for the operating system with the likes of EA, Marmalade, Shiva3D and Unity all getting involved.

It will be very interesting to see what features BBX will rock when it is made available in the future, because the QNX operating system on the Playbook is very slick to use indeed and Blackberry OS, whilst rather dull, does offer good productivity. If Blackberry can get the match just right between seamless graphics and productivity, then they may be able to get out of the hole they are in currently, losing out to the iPhone and Android-based smartphone’s in practically every single market. For those interested, I have imbedded a video below of the Blackberry DevCo 2011 conference, featuring BBX.

Via: T3