Assume,
if you will, that BlackBerry never existed. That should be easy
enough, especially when Research In Motion co-CEO Mike Lazaridis
personally shows you how.
A new tablet-oriented, multitouch operating system called BBX has
been introduced to a legion of developers who are already entrenched in
Android, iOS, and HTML5. Essentially, a new Research In Motion was
launched as well. The old RIM, a provider of enterprise-grade secure
messaging and innovative devices, exited the back door of history
following last week's massive e-mail failure.
"The
whole company is aligning behind this single platform and single
vision," proclaimed Lazaridis at Tuesday's keynote speech for the
BlackBerry DevCon developers' conference in San Francisco. "We're taking
the power of QNX, open standards, and the best of BlackBerry, and
building a powerful development platform for BlackBerry developers."
"The best of BlackBerry" evidently no longer includes what the old
RIM used to refer to as the "services, technology, and infrastructure"
that put the company on the map. Although there are powerful arguments
that the current BlackBerry OS is ill-equipped to compete with today's
iOS and Android devices, when a platform dead-ends, its developers need
somewhere to go where the mission, the target market, and the tools and
techniques are at least
somewhat the same. The term "BlackBerry
smartphones" did make a cameo appearance in slides during Tuesday's
keynote, but the spoken language and demonstrated content made it
extremely clear: RIM's PlayBook is the multitouch, keyboard-less tablet
device that will be the standard for all future BlackBerry development,
and BBX apps for "BlackBerry smartphones" -- whatever they end up
becoming -- will be scaled down to size.
At the end of the BB OS 7 roadmap is a cliff, and the message from RIM this morning is, it's fun to jump.
"We're opening up the platform to a wealth of open source libraries
and open source software, and we can really accelerate now," said
Lazaridis.
The new BBX development platform, built in conjunction with QNX (the
maker of the PlayBook's microkernel), is a huge work in progress. QNX
Software Systems President Dan Dodge told attendees this morning that
the platform's philosophy would be fully open source, but in so doing,
essentially admitted the platform was open to ideas.
BBX is built around the QNX microkernel embedded operating system.
There's no question QNX has already been innovative in many respects.
It's a POSIX system, meaning it's a certified UNIX for portable devices.
(When the acronym was originally coined, "portable" encompassed those
computers that could fit comfortably in the trunk of your car.
Microsoft has made POSIX subsystems going back to Windows NT.)
"If you look under the hood at the technology view... BBX will come
with a fully POSIX-certified kernel, open standards. But its
microkernel architecture brings some unique values, so you get
reliability and security," reported QNX's Dodge. "And to my knowledge,
we have the only kernel that is a certified secure kernel and certified
safe kernel."
QNX does not concern itself directly with the front ends, graphics
engines, and user interfaces of systems; instead, it supports open
source libraries that take care of those jobs -- whatever libraries a
manufacturer may require.
"But we recognize that application developers out there may have
their own particular library that they love and they use," explained
Dodge. "So what we're going to do is port all the open source libraries
that are out there, test them, and post them so our developers can
download those libraries, and they will work immediately. They can
include them as part of their application, and drop them right on the
device. And if we see a lot of developers using the same libraries,
we'll move them into the system libraries so they become part of the
base BBX platform."
The PlayBook with the new BBX is by no means unimpressive. RIM
invited graphics and gaming libraries developers on stage to demonstrate
the clarity and responsiveness of the device, with OpenGL and Unity 3D
integrated into the operating system, and support for 3D environments
libraries including from
Dead Space maker Square Enix.
Indeed, game developers for PCs will have a relatively easy time
exporting their game assets to the PlayBook. And as Lazaridis directly
implied, leaving hints that appeared intentionally designed to be
discovered, the HDMI video output and 5.1 surround sound could make the
PlayBook the most innovative and adaptive game controller since
Nintendo's Wii.
When Unity's mobile games engineer Tracy Erickson appeared on stage
to demonstrate the multitouch responsiveness of a 3D game running under
BBX, Lazaridis couldn't help but notice how the game's controls relied
only upon the user's thumbs. He then openly reminisced about the old
days, when BlackBerry users everywhere typed messages to each other with
their thumbs. Ah, the old days!
If developers are interested in a "bridge" platform for apps that
address BlackBerry's existing users along with current and future
PlayBook users, then this class of applications must be created now.
The tool for this is HTML5.
That said, BBX employs its own native graphics library, designed to be addressable through HTML5 but
not a part of BB OS 7. Its name is Cascades. Think of it as RIM's counterpart to
Microsoft's Metro library for Windows 8 tablets. It includes technologies that
RIM acquired last December through TAT (The Astonishing Tribe), a Sweden-based design firm; and will be implemented through Web apps technologies that
RIM acquired back in August 2009 through Torch Mobile.
The first iterations of Cascades design resembled BlackBerry not in
the least. For a photo browsing application, a series of full-color
glossy pages floated down from the sky as if being dropped by a careless
courier. They had flow and movement, and even a comfortable degree of
messiness that's uncharacteristic of BlackBerry style up to now.
But then there was a messaging and e-mail application. E-mail, for
those of you who are too young to remember, was the service that
launched RIM. The Cascades prototype messaging app projected a kind of
word cloud containing
live heuristics of the terms and phrases
your friends would be sharing or tweeting over the various social
services. The relative volume and abundance of these terms creates
ripples in the live heuristic waves, like a spastic chambermaid flapping
a handful of rainbow bedsheets. The result not only ceased to resemble
e-mail in any known form or format. It ceased to make much sense,
which is most unusual for BlackBerry.
It's difficult to imagine the union of the two sets of customers RIM
is trying to appease with this: the veteran BlackBerry users with the
prospective PlayBook users.
There does continue to be some vision of PlayBook, and devices based
on it, as an enterprise-managed tool. As RIM's enterprise VP Alan
Panezic demonstrated, PlayBooks with BBX will be provisioned by data
servers, similar to how they provision virtual desktops today. The
provisioning process determines which apps the PlayBook user sees on her
home screen, as well as which optional apps are available to her from
the AppWorld store. Companies can annex virtual AppWorld departments
all to themselves, featuring only those apps that follow corporate
policies.
What makes today's demonstration of RIM's BBX platform so baffling is
not the technology of the device -- which is outstanding, from what
we've seen thus far. It's that RIM, of all companies, has failed to
define the underlying services which support it. Tablet computing has
been "forthcoming" for nearly two decades, but for the public at large,
Apple invented it in January 2010. When it did so, Apple had already
established a strong set of support services around iTunes, which
enabled users
who already had iPhones to embrace this new device along with newcomers.
We can forgive most other manufacturers for not having learned the
lesson of the value of underlying services. But not RIM, which appeared
to have learned that lesson the
right way the first time: with a
patented back-end secure messaging system that, at least up until last
week, was the envy of the modern world. RIM got this right before Apple
got this right. It would appear today that RIM has spent so much time
re-inventing its devices (over two years in R&D now) that it has
neglected its infrastructure. If RIM cannot back up BBX with as firm a
foundation as BlackBerry devices had in 2006, then BBX will be about as
meaningful in the modern context of small devices as webOS.