It looks like the rumors about BBX being announced at DevCon 2011 turned out to be true. At the BlackBerry DevCon today, RIM officially unveiled its next generation smartphone platform: BBX. After 12 years of churning out phones based on the BlackBerry OS, it looks like the company is ready to move forward with a new platform. And it’s about time. While BBX will be built from the ground up, it is said to combine the best parts of BlackBerry and QNX.
The BBX platform will include BBX-OS, support BlackBerry cloud services and development environments for both HTML5 and native developers. BBX will also support apps developed using tools available today for the PlayBook (native SDK, Adobe AIR/Flash, WebWorks/HTML5 and BlackBerry Runtime for Android apps). BBX will also feature the sweet-looking Cascades UI Framework which was also shown for the first time today, and will bring “Super App” such as deep integration between apps, always-on Push services, the BBM Social Platform and more.
In addition to the unveiling of BBX at the DevCon, RIM also introduced the developer beta version of the PlayBook OS 2.0. This means that PlayBook users are one step closer to getting a major update to their tablets. PlayBook OS 2.0 will come with a set of tools that will let developers bring their Android apps over to the BlackBerry PlayBook: BlackBerry Runtime for Android Apps, BlackBerry Plug-In for Android Development Tools (ADT) and the BlackBerry Packager for Android Apps.
No word on when we’ll get to see the new operating systems in action, but let’s hope it will be sooner than later.
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