So they showed he OS to the DEV's
Was that one CEO per DEV? and who dealt with the dog?
Whilst QNX is nice etc few obvious observations.
1) Given the current device OS isn't that unstable then what does this offer the customer
2) Given the current device OS is standards secure then what does this offer the customer
3) Will this make the back-end more secure from outages - NO
4) How will this help grow the littering of BB dev's given the current showing of the dev platform (ie playbook) was applauded in being such a pain to develop for that people went public with there distaste for this.
These are just a few things that stand out for me having given this 4 seconds thought.
Now future use - given other smartphones looking at quad-core and the like and android already has a VM layer why not look at offering this as a alternative phone OS/phone VM ahead of that market - ie innovate. This would capatalise upon there niche of a email service, though would reduce them to being another application to some. Though I'm sure one day I'll be able to buy a samsung phone and have the option of booting android or windows - its going to happen and why not.
Whilst the playbook hasn;t realy done them may favours it may have highlighted one area they should be looking at - a cheap kindle like device that ran QNX and you could do your email upon, indeed partner with amazon and become there messaging partners as would help you both. Bit a cheap communications don't care about DIVX and youtube and flash or indeed colour kind of basic kindle like tablet for email would of been a more logical choice.
RIM do email, email don't need flash graphics now does it. Had they done that then they would be selling now - heck kindle like device with RIM's email services would be realy nice and usable device - but I'm not one of the CEO's they have, clearly.
The only real concerns I have nowadays is what damage by being in RIM's hands will QNX suffer now as it did have a realy good reputation and when I played with it for a few projects eons ago it realy did stand out for the job of realtime usage.
For there offerings etc and feature sets RIM phones are overpriced by far and that is not helping them nomatter what OS they ran. Indeed if RIM phones could run IOS5 or Android etc then I'd dare say they would still sell in the same numebrs they are now, sadly enough. But I personaly wasn't a fan of them biasing towards consumer markets and think it all has gone downhill for them since the pearl and them dropping a realy functional and useful jog-wheel infavour of the drunk nipple with inbuilt navigation speed-limiter by design.
I would also say most people are of the oppinion that RIM will be brought out and it's been a question of who and why hasn't it already happened. But when that has been the flavour of the day for near on two years now then you wonder how much further can RIM implode. Maybe there service by design is not a good fit and after all its realy a few pattents that everybody else have worked around and a email service that others have started to do as well in a more distributed way that affords no central death - even if it is 3 days to replace a faulty switch which even 20 years ago was uneceptable downtime for such an issue.
I hope they do something special and live on but even "next-generation mobile platform"''s need something ontop as even a sidewalk is a platform for mobile phones in noise speak and they sure do be looking at that gutter fast.