Blackberry / RIM with QNX, hmm, interesting

By Vasudev Ram

This post was triggered by a post from Sramana Mitra that I recently saw: RIM’s International Footprint Widening

Apart from growth news about RIM (Research In Motion, the maker of the Blackberry), such as the following excerpts:

1) [ Research in Motion (RIM) (NASDAQ:RIMM) last week reported strong third quarter results that beat all estimates. On the other hand, research firms and analysts have been reporting on dismal performance of its BlackBerry phones compared to that of Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android phones. Let’s dig deeper. ]

...

2) [ Third quarter revenue was $5.49 billion, up 40% y-o-y and 19% q-o-q. ]

3) [ RIM shipped a record 14.2 million devices, up 40%. It added about 5.1 million net new BlackBerry subscriber accounts in the quarter, and the total customer base is over 55 million. ]

..., the post also says that:

[ It (RIM) also announced the BlackBerry Tablet OS and the BlackBerry PlayBook in late September. The PlayBook is expected to begin shipping in the United States in the first quarter of 2011. The BlackBerry PlayBook is powered by the BlackBerry Tablet OS, which is based on technology from the QNX acquisition early this year. ]

(RIM had acquired QNX over the last year, according to the article.)

and ...

[ According to analyst firm Jefferies:

“We had already thought that the [BlackBerry-owned] QNX OS was excellent, but it could be even better after TAT incorporates some of its innovative 3D-like designs. TAT’s prior work on Android interfaces has been well received by reviewers and consumers.” ]

I had briefly tried out (for a day or two) the QNX operating system, from a PCQuest CD, some years ago, and found it blazingly fast at the time. As I understood then, it's (very roughly speaking) a kind of Linux clone (or more correctly, an OS with support for some POSIX standards), but meant for embedded applications, though it worked on my desktop PC too.

So it may be interesting to check out the new QNX-based Blackberry devices from RIM as they launch ...



- Vasudev Ram - Dancing Bison Enterprises