RIM to Spread QNX Operating System Across All Products
Research in Motion’s PlayBook tablet is the first of many products that will deploy the QNX operating system that will spread across all Blackberry devices by early 2012, Product Strategy Manager Jonathan Wong said.
QNX, which RIM acquired last year from Harman International along with its Neutrino real-time operating system, will replace the Blackberry OS as the company throws its weight behind software widely adopted by automakers to power Bluetooth integration and device connectivity. QNX helped speed RIM’s tablet development that had languished for years, and provided a ready base of industrial, medical and automotive customers for RIM technology, Senior Product Manager Shaun Coughlin said.
"You will see smartphones adopt it starting in January and it will power all of our devices going forward,” Wong said. “They have a very optimized real-time operating system that is highly secured and scalable so we are taking it to all products."
The initial PlayBook, which will be available in 16 GB ($399), 32 GB ($499), and 64 GB ($599) storage configurations starting Tuesday, will give way to a 4G/WiMAX version by late summer for Sprint and Long Term Evolution (LTE) and HSPA+ versions by fall, Coughlin said. While RIM was slow to respond to Apple’s iPad that last year jump-started a long-languishing tablet market, the PlayBook is tailored to Blackberry users through a bridge application that gives it access to Blackberry smartphone content via Bluetooth. This brings all the functionality which corporate clients prefer -- secured email, calendar, and contact books on PlayBook. But all those features also aren’t native to PlayBook. It also lacks features to sync other email accounts, including Google’s Gmail and Microsoft’s Hotmail.
The PlayBook also marked a major change for RIM in moving to a Texas Instruments dual-core 1 GHz OMAP-4 processor to power the device. Marvel’s Armada chips have been heart of the Blackberry handhelds, but typically topped out at 624 MHz in the case of the Torch. “TI happened to have the right chip we wanted for HD out and recording,” Coughlin said. “The whole OMAP series is extremely powerful and you throw QNX on top of it and it gives an OS that allows for true multi-syncing. The OS is so small that if anything fails they can shut down, but not reset the device."
PlayBook features a seven-inch LCD with 1,024x600 resolution, 1 GB RAM, 12 to 13 GB of free storage space, USB and HDMI ports, and a three-megapixel camera on the front and a five-megapixel version on the back for video capture and conferencing. PlayBook is slightly thicker at 0.4 inches than the iPad 2 and Samsung Galaxy 10.1 tablet at 0.34 and 0.33 inches. The OS consumes a small amount of storage -- 200,000 lines of programming -- and PlayBook comes pre-loaded with about 40 applications including Kobo e-reader and Slacker Radio. About 3,000 downloadable applications will be available for PlayBook, many of them ported over from the Blackberry. A native software development kit for “drilling deeper” into the PlayBook for GPS and accelerometer applications, will be available in May, with Android compatibility to follow by mid-summer, Wong said. Unlike iPad, PlayBook runs Adobe Air for flash applications and is preloaded with Blackberry Enterprise Server software. Another recent RIM purchase -- The Astonishing Tribe -- developed a photo book application for PlayBook along with a calculator and other utilities, Wong said.
As it prepares for the PlayBook launch, RIM also is said to readying a follow up to the Touch that features a 3.7-inch LCD with 800x480 resolution, 1.2 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, 750 MB RAM, microSD slot, 5-megapixel camera for 720p video recording and 4x zoom and 1,230-milliampere lithium ion battery.