Blackberry Tablet expected soon

RIM's Blackberry Tablet or "blackpad" is due for imminent release. Surprisingly it's based on a version of QNX operating system not the Blackberry OS (RIM purchased QNX a while ago). QNX has produced embedded POSIX operating systems such as Neutrino for a while and now it's rumoured that that in the future RIM will utilise Neutrino (or another OS from QNX) as the basis for all the Blackberry products, bye bye Blackberry OS.

RIM's Blackberry OS though optimised for their handsets, is proprietary and must take a huge amount of resource to keep going. QNX on the other hand has been making real-time embedded operating systems for many years (well before RIM came on the scene), it's been ported to many CPU architectures and 'just works'. As a POSIX OS it's also relatively easy to port from other more common operating systems such as Linux.

As long as all the Blackberry functionality is maintained (i.e. Push Email, BIS/BES support) which are really just applications, they should also work on a QNX OS. This will also allow RIM to support modern processors and rapidly deploy new smartphones as the hardware becomes available.

It might just give them the edge again and RIM can put the Blackberry back into the enterprise market while still keeping the youth market by making their phones sexy too.