At BlackBerry DevCon Americas 2011, Research In Motion (RIM) this week unveiled BlackBerry BBX, its next generation mobile platform that takes the best of the BlackBerry smartphone platform and the best of the QNX platform to connect people, devices, content and services.

BBX is the next generation platform for BlackBerry smartphones and tablets. It combines the best of BlackBerry and the best of QNX and is designed from the ground up to enable the powerful real-time mobile experiences. The BBX platform will include BBX-OS, and will support BlackBerry cloud services and development environments for both HTML5 and native developers. BBX will also support applications developed using any of the tools available today for the BlackBerry PlayBook – including Native SDK, Adobe AIR/Flash and WebWorks/HTML5, as well as the BlackBerry Runtime for Android Apps – on future BBX-based tablets and smartphones.

BBX will also include the new BlackBerry Cascades UI Framework for advanced graphics, and bring “Super App” capabilities to enable many advanced capabilities including deep integration between apps, always-on Push services, the BBM social platform and so on.

RIM revealed that a number of video game developers have already ported their engines onto the BBX platform thanks to the fact that it supports a great variety of open standards and industry-standard tools.

In addition to BBX operating system, RIM also introduced a series of tools that allow software designers to develop applications using various platforms for various Blackberry smartphones and PlayBook tablets or port programs for Android to Blackberry devices.

"At DevCon today, we're giving developers the tools they need to build richer applications and we’re providing direction on how to best develop their smartphone and tablet apps as the BlackBerry and QNX platforms converge into our next generation BBX platform," said Mike Lazaridis, President and Co-CEO at RIM.

Unfortunately, RIM did not disclose when the first BBX-based devices hit the market.

Tags: RIM, Blackberry, PlayBook, BBX, QNX, Android, Adobe, Flash