Over the past few days, two leading companies – Apple and Google – have introduced their new mobile operating systems. RIM is also trying to keep up with them, which this Tuesday introduced BlackBerry BBX, a new generation platform for smartphones and tablets.
However, when the new OS will be available, RIM representatives did not specify.
The company announced the new OS at the DevCon 2011 conference in San Francisco. The platform will combine the BlackBerry smartphone operating system and the QNX platform, which is powered by the BlackBerry Playbook tablet aimed at business customers. Changes to developer tools were also announced at the conference.
“By downloading almost five million apps a day, our users have made BlackBerry one of the most profitable platforms for developers,” said Mike Lazaridis, CEO of RIM. “Today we are also presenting tools that will help developers create more profitable applications, and we, in turn, will try to help them with this.”
Despite such statements, many industry experts believe that over the next year the brand will continue to lose not only end users, but also corporate customers.
The habit factor will help to keep loyal users for a while. Also, BlackBerry will remain for some time with those corporate customers whose advanced technical systems cannot easily and simply switch to another mobile platform. “BlackBerry still has such vertical business applications that will allow it to retain market share for a while,” says Kevin Noonan, director of market research at Ovum.
But those users who do not depend on the platform at this level will simply prefer to change the phone.
Even Mike Walkley, a representative of Sanaccord Genuity, who spoke positively about the new OS, noted that “BBX needs further improvements to compete on an equal footing with iOS and Android developers.”