14 DAY TRIAL // Canadian mobile phone maker Research In Motion has recently confirmed plans to bring the new QNX operating system to its BlackBerry smartphone too, though only on those who would include dual-core processors inside.
During the D:Dive Into Mobile conference, RIM co-CEO Mike Lazaridis confirmed the company's plans to make the OS available for mobile phones too, in addition to having it packed on the BlackBerry PlayBook Tablet PC.
According to RIM's Mike Lazaridis, the handset vendor plans on bringing the PlayBook's QNX platform to smartphones “as soon as [he has] dual core baseband CPUs.”
Unfortunately, he did not offer a specific time frame for when that might happen, but, considering the fact that the first dual-core handsets are only months away, if not weeks, it should not be too long before the company makes the move.
The QNX platform is the foundation of the newly announced BlackBerry Tablet OS, which runs on the company's first tablet PC ever, the BlackBerry PlayBook.
Previous rumors on the matter suggested that RIM would plan on making the solution available for its future touchscreen-enabled mobile phones, but no confirmation on this emerged until now. There is no telling on whether RIM would plan on packing the platform only on touchscreen devices or not.
As the guys over at Engadget note, RIM seems to be acknowledging that the Blackberry OS would not scale on more powerful devices, as well as that the QNX platform won't fit in today's smartphones as long as they do not taste hardware updates.
Of course, there still is a wide range of details to be unveiled here, but, for the time being, the good news is that RIM is strongly considering upgrading its smartphones to the new platform.
As stated above, the first mobile phones packing dual-core processors are expected to become available on the market in the very near future, and RIM might announce that it moved forward with its plans pretty soon too. Stay tuned for more.