RIM officially announces new BBX operating system for phones and tablets

The first day of RIM's annual DevCon started this morning with a keynote speech from co-CEO Mike Lazaridis. As expected, the executive announced a new operating system which will be called BBX. According to QNX founder Dan Dodge, BBX will be for phones and tablets and the whole company is aligning itself behind this one operating system.

Because BBX uses the same source code found on BlackBerry OS 6 and OS 7, HTML5 apps that work on either of those two will work on BBX. The UI is said to be based on the Cascades framework developed by The Amazing Tribe. Because BlackBerry remains popular among enterprise users, a new "Work" tab has been added to BlackBerry App World.

RIM also announced a new developer beta for the BlackBerry PlayBook that takes the software to 2.0. This includes the BlackBerry Runtime for Android apps which allows developers to make their Android apps compatible with the RIM tablet. Either a BlackBerry-specific plug in can be added or thedeveloper can use the BlackBerry Packager, which we showed you on video earlier.

The conference runs through Wednesday and we still expect to see RIM introduce at least one of its new BBX flavored SuperPhone models one day during the event.

source: Thisismynext

**UPDATE**
A video of the Cascades UI has been released by RIM and it shows the animations and transitions that are now available to developers through the BlackBerry Native SDK. Cascades also offers flexible list layouts and 3D support. It is all good for those writing apps for BlackBerry devices.

source: Crackberry