14 DAY TRIAL // Canadian mobile phone maker Research In Motion is moving forward with the development of its mobile operating system, the BlackBerry OS. On Monday, RIM's co-CEO Mike Lazaridis announced officially that the next version of the platform was set to arrive on the market sometime during summer, in the third quarter of the ongoing year, to be more precise.
The new flavor of RIM's BlackBerry OS was rumored for quite some time now to land on the market during the ongoing year. There is a nice range of new features headed for users in the upcoming BlackBerry OS 6.0, that's for sure, starting with enhanced support for touchscreen displays (an optimized interface, it seems), though the solution will come both on touch and non-touch smartphones.
The first mobile phone to come with the BlackBerry OS 6.0 on board should include a trackpad, touch control and a QWERTY keyboard, some of the latest reports around the web suggest. Moreover, RIM seems set to make the solution available for older handsets too, though it's still uncertain how many of them will actually support the new operating system version.
“We’re trying to update the UI and fix the stuff that people wanted us to fix,” RIM Co-CEO Mike Lazaridis stated during an analyst call on Monday, a recent article on IntoMobile reads. Lazaridis also noted that the solution was a “both inspired and grounded design.” This might suggest that the BlackBerry experience will still arrive with the upcoming OS variant, though there will be certain tweaks included in the package to make it more appealing.
Among the other novelties BlackBerry OS 6.0 should include, we can count the company's all-new WebKit-based browser, which is tightly integrated with the platform, and which won't be released for OS 5.0-based devices. “We’ll have a better browser that can perform at a high level,” RIM’s Alan Panezic stated, adding that “There are a lot of apps on the enterprise side, in particular, that can be web-ified quite easily if you only have a capable browser.”