RicDay on Publishing

The announcement of the new Blackberry tablet, the Playbook, was not a complete surprise. The rumor mill had been grinding away on it for months. But the details contained a number of surprises.

The biggest surprise for me was the operating system. QNX is a small, POSIX-certified, real time operating system. I used it way back in the days before Windows when I was looking for a way to build a reliable, small-footprint FidoNet communications server. QNX looked excellent for the task (this was around version 2, as I recall). Problems abounded — not with QNX, which was excellent, but I never reall liked the C programming language and after wrestling with the task for a while, decided to move on to other projects.

I followed the evolution of QNX for a while, but it moved towards being a chip-embedded OS for machine tools and my interest waned.

So I was really surprised when RIM announced that QNX will be the OS for its new tablet. I’m sure it will be fast and, at the OS level, very reliable and stable, but I do wonder at the decision.

Developers?

RIM will not be using the OS which powers its cell phones. In fact, RIM will be replacing the Blackberry OS with QNX across its entire product line! The timeline for that is unclear, but it seems that the next major Blackberry OS release, 7.0, will be a sort of halfway house between the old OS and the new, QNX-based version.

I hope RIM plans on having a lot of tools available to help developers port their Blackberry apps to the new OS.

RIM is also going to have an interesting sales task on its hands: convincing app developers to add Balckberry QNX to their development targets, alongside iOS4, Android, Chrome, WebOS, and all those other smartphone and tablet operating systems. Dedicated Blackberry developers will probably pause to wonder if they should stay and make the change, or move to one or two of the more established platforms. I expect those who focus on business applications will stay; those in the games and leisure app categories may not be as faithful.

A Wait Too Long?

A further problem lies in the fact that the new Playbook tablet will not launch until sometime in Q1, 2011. There is a better than good chance that Apple will have released a new version of the iPad by then, and that Amazon will have entered the tablet ranks as well. No doubt there will also be a lot more Android devices, and HP will be launching its WebOS-powered PalmPad around the same time the Playbook appears.

For some business users, a secure, locked-down tablet which handles email, messaging, word processing, browsing, and access to corporate data will be enough. That is the heart of RIM’s market. My question is, can RIM sell the Playbook to less buttoned-down customers, or must it accept being a niche market player? We have two Blackberries and an iPhone here at home; both Blackberries are about to be replaced, probaby with iPhones. I see the same happening in the office, where iPhones and Android devices are replacing Blackberries as fast as individual contracts run out.

2011 will be an interesting year for RIM and the Blackberry brand. A tough one, I think.