Maybe you’re over the nearly week-long global BlackBerry outage that erupted on October 12. Maybe you were swayed by the video apology of Mike Lazaridis, founder of BlackBerry’s parent company Research in Motion. Maybe you liked RIM’s offer of free apps and free tech support enough to shut up and stop asking for more compensation. Maybe not.
Either way, RIM is still very, very, very sorry for that whole pesky outage thing and Mike Lazaridis still isn’t done making amends for that, even kicking off DevCon, BlackBerry’s developer conference in San Francisco which began Tuesday, with another apology.
As PC Magazine reported on the event:
“I want to address some recent news items,” Lazaridis said, referring to intermittent BlackBerry service delays that spread throughout the world after first cropping up in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia last Monday.
“We restored full services as quickly as we could. Now we’re working on root cause analysis and we’re focused on making this right for BB users around the world. So all BlackBerry users are getting $100 worth of BlackBerry apps free of charge starting tomorrow.”
Still, RIM did manage to give fans at least some reason to cheer at the conference, finally introducing a revamped operating system, BBX, incorporating the QNX, the real-time mobile operating system purchased by RIM back in April 2010.
The company announced the new OS in a press release Tuesday, pointing out it’ll support apps development natively and on HTML5:
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 (shown for the first time today), and bring “Super App” capabilities to enable many advanced capabilities including deep integration between apps, always-on Push services, the BBM(TM) Social Platform, and much more.
As Engadget reported: “Dan Dodge, President of QNX, mentioned that the new OS — designed for smartphones and tablets alike — is a “single, unified platform for the whole world,” incorporating Enterprise, NOC and cloud services.”
Still, the initial reviews of the announcement were decidedly mixed at best. Citing the lack of any projected release date, PC World‘s Tom Bradley called the new OS a “pipe dream,” writing “Without a timeline and more specifics, BBX is ‘all hat, no cattle,’ as we say in Texas. ” And as ZDNet‘s Andrew Nusca chimed in: “Lazaridis aims to lure developers back from Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android platforms, but you could argue that he simply needs to do a better job providing a mobile platform for the enterprise.”
RIM’s stock, which had suffered during the outage, climbed from to $22.72 to $23.31 after Tuesday’s announcement, but on Wednesday, it fell back down to close at $22.30, suggesting investors weren’t exactly blown away by the new OS or RIM’s subsequent prospects.
