The company will announce more on the OS at DevCon Asia

Dec 7, 2011 07:17 GMT  ·  By

Canadian mobile phone maker Research In Motion has just announced that its next generation mobile platform for smartphones is expected to arrive on devices under the name of BlackBerry 10, and not BBX, as announced a few months ago.

The reason for that is very simple: the company has just lost the legal battle for the BBX trademark in favor of BASIS International Ltd., which has a set of development tools available with the same name.

The United States Federal Court in Albuquerque announced on December 6th a temporary restraining order (TRO) against RIM, preventing the handset vendor from using the BBX trademark at its Asian DevCon on December 7-8 in Singapore.

RIM already revealed on Twitter plans to change the name of the OS: “Asia Keynote: BlackBerry 10 is the official name of the next generation platform that will power future BlackBerry smartphones.”

According to the court, the BBX mark that BASIS uses is identical with the mark that RIM is using to present its product.

The court also notes that, "despite the fact that the two companies are not direct competitors, the parties' respective BBX products are highly related and target the same class of consumers, that is, business application software developers (TRO page 9)."

Since the use of the same mark for two related products could result in confusion, RIM was blocked from using the BBX name for its new mobile OS.

"Accordingly, after considering all the factors relative to a determination of whether an injunction should be granted, the Court finds that all factors weigh in favor of BASIS (TRO page 8)."

"The alleged infringement is likely to cause customers and prospective customers to wrongly believe that the software applications created using BASIS's development tools are only compatible with RIM's BBX operating system (TRO page 11)," the court concluded.

At DevCon Asia, RIM should unveil some more info on its brand new mobile OS, while being expected to launch the first handsets running under the platform sometime in 2012.