Research in Motion is trying to generate a positive spin on things following a truly horrible week for the company last week. Today at RIM"s DevCon event, company executives have officially announced its new operating system, which it is calling BBX. News.com reports that according to RIM"s co-CEO Mike Lazaridis, the new BBX platform will combine the best features of its long running Blackberry mobile operating system with QNX, which RIM used as the basis for its recent Playbook tablet device.
The DevCon keynote began with Lazaridis taking the stage to again apologize for the outages that affected Blackberry owners last week. Some users were unable to access email, text messaging or web browsing features on their Blackberry smartphone for as long as three days. RIM blamed the problems on the hardware failure in its network infrastructure. Lazaridia said, "The worldwide outages we experienced this week were unfortunate." It remains to be seen if the outages will cause a number of current Blackberry users to think about ditching their smartphone for a competitor like an iPhone or an Android-based device.
Engadget further reports that BBX has also been certified as POSIX (Portable Operating System Interface for Unix) which should open up BBX to be used by more developers. It will give app creators over 100 open source libraries to use with the operating system. During the company"s keynote address RIM also announced its full support behind HTML5 which it says is the "obvious choice for modern application development."