According to IntoMobile, a Research in Motion VP, over a breakfast event this morning at DEVCON 2010, confirmed that the QNX operating system that runs on the the BlackBerry PlayBook will eventually replace BlackBerry OS running on BlackBerry smartphones. We pondered last week if BlackBerry 6 was actually the next-gen BlackBerry OS or a stop-gap until the real next deal comes out. The time scale on such a move however is probably not as near term as we would like as BlackBerry 7 would probably be the BlackBerry OS stepping stone into the QNX based BlackBerry OS.
[Via IntoMobile]
Whether or not BB survives will depend on how fast they can get this running on their mobile phones. If it doesn’t happen sometime in 2011 then they might as well forget it.
Survives? RIM has issues, but, they are selling way too many devices for their demise to be that imminent. I agree that they would probably take a permanent back seat to to Apple, Android, and maybe even MS if they don’t, but, RIM is poised to dominate the low-end handset market and they are still king of the hill in the enterprise.
Carriers love the BlackBerry because they put less data load on their networks and low end devices, pretty much all Blackberries at this point, are practically given away. RIM isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, but, I would agree that that dragging their feet on replacing the BlackBerry OS with QNX could relegate them to feature phone status as far as consumers go.
They said the same thing about Palm. Look at them now.
That was the same thing they said about WinMo way back when too.
QNX needs to BE OS7, not OS7 as stepping stone to QNX. Anything after OS7 is too late in my opinion.