BlackBerry 6.1 Won’t be QNX Based

Research In Motion will be hosting their BlackBerry World conference next week. We expect RIM to launch their new Smartphone and also unveil new OS BlackBerry 6.1.

When RIM acquired QNX, we expected them to announce QNX based handsets by at least mid 2011. RIM has already released their QNX based tablet – PlayBook. And despite the negative reviews that it gathered, RIM sold more than 100,000 PlayBooks in its initial week of availability, according to Wall Street Journal. RIM has indicated that Smartphones based on BlackBerry 6.1 will be made available only by end of this fiscal year and that it does not have QNX based Smartphones to showcase at the BlackBerry World Conference next week.

All we can gather from this is that BlackBerry 6.1 won’t be based on QNX RTOS, but will just be a major enhancement over BlackBerry 6.0. Apparently, we’ll get to see QNX based handsets only next year when BlackBerry announces BlackBerry 7 or 8 which kind of surprises us since BlackBerry eventually plans to move to QNX and yet continues to work on their previous OS.

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