RIM: BBX becomes BlackBerry 10 to avoid legal problems

RIM, attacked for using the name BBX for their future platform, has decided to change names. At DevCon Asia which is about to open, people will now be talking about BlackBerry 10.

Research in Motion (RIM) which has seen a slowdown in its activity recently, is betting big on BBX, their future mobile platform to try and restore the company to past glories. Officially unveiled in October, the platform should start to be present in mobile devices in the first half of 2012.

The platform will now not be known as BBX though. As soon as RIM announced the name, a company based in New Mexico, Basis International, made it known that they already had a software line available with the same name, and they weren’t willing to negotiate.

Going even further with their threats in these last few weeks, they filed a gag order last week to prevent RIM from using the BBX name during their upcoming DevCon Asia developer’s conference, which takes place on the 7 and 8th of December in Singapore.


BlackBerry 10, not BBX, is being spoken about at DevCon Asia
Basis believes that it is highly likely that their BBX and RIM’s BBX brands will cause confusion, with this prejudicing their developments in the mobile field – especially since their solutions are platform independent.

The negotiations (if they even took place) have obviously not worked out for RIM, who has now decided to change their product name. The manufacturer’s next mobile platform will now be named BlackBerry 10 at DevCon Asia.

While RIM wanted to break with such denominations with their platforms to demonstrate they this isn’t just a simple evolution of BlackBerry OS, it appears they have failed, even though they will move from 7 (current version) to 10, suggesting that there is a lot of new features in the release. The new platform is actually to be a merger between BlackBerry OS and QNX, the OS used in the PlayBook tablet.