BlackBerry holding company Research In Motion (RIM) has announced the next iteration of its mobile operating system (OS), dubbed BBX. The Canadian smartphone and tablet maker unveiled the new platform during BlackBerry DevCon Americas 2011, currently underway in San Francisco.

RIM’s BlackBerry BBX platform combines the best elements of its BlackBerry OS platform and the PlayBook’s QNX platform to connect people, devices, content and services. As with Google’s newly unveiled Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich), it will be powering both the company’s smartphones and tablets going forward. The BBX platform will include BBX-OS and will support BlackBerry cloud services as well as the development environments for both HTML5 and native developers.

According to RIM, BBX will also support applications developed using any of the tools available today for the BlackBerry PlayBook, such as Native SDK, Adobe AIR/Flash and WebWorks/HTML5, as well as the BlackBerry Runtime for Android Apps on future BBX-based tablets and smartphones.

For developers

In addition to this new platform, RIM also revealed a series of developer tool updates, including WebWorks for BlackBerry smartphones and tablets, the Native SDK for the BlackBerry PlayBook and a developer beta of BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0 with support for running Android applications.

"With nearly 5 million BlackBerry apps downloaded daily, our customers have made BlackBerry one of the most profitable platforms for developers," said Mike Lazaridis, president and co-CEO at RIM.

"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."

 

In related news RIM has also announced that customers effected by the recent BlackBerry outtage, will be compensated with a selection of premium apps worth over $100 (R787).