Still reeling from a three-day outage that disrupted service for millions of customers last week, BlackBerry maker Research in Motion on Tuesday unveiled a new operating system that it hopes will lure back customers and help it compete with Apple and Google.
RIM’s co-chief executive Mike Lazaridis unveiled the next-generation smart phone software at a developers’ conference in San Francisco and said it would power new BlackBerrys and Playbook tablet computers by next year.
“Today I’m pleased to announce our next generation platform, BBX,” said Mr. Lazaridis, who disappointed some by failing to give an exact timeline for the release or more than a cursory demonstration of its abilities.
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“We’re doing everything we can to make it easier than ever to submit apps and sign up,” Mr. Lazaridis said. “We’re removing roadblocks.
This is a very exciting time for BlackBerry developers.” RIM chose to debut the BBX operating system at its annual developer conference in order to encourage software makers to create apps for the system, which has far less software available for it than the iPhone or smart phones powered by Google’s Android operating system.
Google and Samsung are set to announce a new phone Wednesday running an updated version of that software. Apple introduced its new iPhone 4S over the weekend and sold a record 4 million devices in three days.
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