For its PlayBook tablet device, RIM decided to create an entirely new operating system rather than adapt its mobile OS. The new tablet OS was based on the QNX real-time embedded OS. Now with the release of the BlackBerry 10 OS, the same QNX-based core will now power their mobiles as well.
What the new OS offers doesn’t seem to be far from what we have come to expect from the other popular modern mobile operating systems such as Android and iOS. RIM is effectively playing catch up. How successful they are, and whether this will be enough, only time will tell.
What is interesting about this new OS is the new Cascades SDK that RIM offers for developing for the BlackBerry. It seems that the new SDK is based on the cross-platform Qt toolkit. Now Qt has effectively gained another platform, BlackBerry.
For those who aren’t familiar with Qt, it has an interesting history. It is a cross-platform toolkit that is used by the popular desktop environment, KDE Workspaces. It is heavily cross-platform, and allows creating GUI apps not only for Linux, Windows, and Mac OSX, but also a mobile OSs such as Maemo / MeeGo, Symbian and other embedded environments — even an Android port is in development. It was purchased by Nokia, and they intended to use it as a singular way to create applications for all their mobile operating systems till they suddenly switched to Windows.
The Cascades SDK takes advantage of QML, a recent addition to the Qt framework, that allows creating declarative GUIs that can be written in JavaScript while still using C code for the heavy work.
Currently the SDK and simulators are in beta, but they are available for public use. You can find out more about BlackBerry 10 and the Cascades SDK from here