RIM announces BBX OS for smartphones and tablets

RIM's annual DevCon is underway and during the keynote speech by co-CEO Mike Lazaridis a new operating system named BBX was announced.

BBX is the name given to RIM's QNX based OS and will power future phones and tablets under the BlackBerry brand. Since BBX uses the same source code as BlackBerry OS 6 and OS 7, HTML apps that were built for the older operating systems will work on BBX. The UI is said to be based on the Cascades framework developed by the Amazing Tribe.

BlackBerry OS 6.1 announced

BlackBerry's first DevCon Asia took place from the 13th to the 14th of January 2011 at Bali Indonesia. This event hosted the announcement of BlackBerry OS 6.1 which was presented during the keynote at the opening day.

Version 6.1 is said to build on Blackberry OS 6 and introduce some new features for developers to take advantage of. As you can also see from the image above some of these features are.