Research in Motion, ironically, might need to do some more research before coming up with names for its products. Back in October, the smartphone and tablet company announced that its next generation operating system, to launch sometime in 2012, would use the term BBX. But that new branding didn"t last very long.
As posted on the official BlackBerry developer Twitter page late on Tuesday, RIM has now changed the name of the OS to the more familiar BlackBerry 10. The change was announced during the company"s DevCon Asia event. That will be the new branding of the platform that RIM will use as the basis for its upcoming Blackberry smartphone.
So why did RIM change the name in the first place? It was forced to do so by a federal judge. RIM apparently didn"t do its due diligence in trying to see who might have owned the BBX trademark. As it turned out, it was already claimed by BASIS International, which is a business software development company.
ZDNet.com reports that while RIM tried to claim the BBX trademark, a U.S. federal court judge in Albuquerque, New Mexico ruled otherwise. It put an injuction on RIM from using the BBX brand. So RIM finally caved, as they should have earlier, and changed the name to BlackBerry 10. It certainly will be much more memorable for RIM"s next operation system than BBX, which sounds like they are making software for BMX riders.