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RIM turns to QNX OS for a tablet
MAKER OF MOBILE GADGETS Research in Motion (RIM) has abandoned its own operating system for its forthcoming tablet in favour of one built by an outfit it just bought called QNX.
QNX, which RIM bought from Harman International Industries for $200 million in April, has a fairly natty operating system that is used all over the place, from BMW audio systems to the Army's Crusher tank.
QNX has customers in the automotive, industrial, medical, and communications industries. Its software helps control the music, media and navigation systems in cars such as those from Bayerische Motoren Werke AG and Porsche SE.
Its technology is under the bonnet of cardiac monitoring systems, nuclear power plants, weapons systems and the unmanned, six-wheel vehicle developed by Carnegie Mellon University's National Robotics Engineering Centre for the US Army in 2006.
This apparently interests the maker of Blackberrys because it can take advantage of the software work that has been done by QNX to get enough consumer type products onto the new tablet.
Apple is seen by RIM as being a lot more consumer oriented than the Blackberry, which lacks much in the way of end-user software applications beyond business functionality.
In-car entertainment systems are not that far removed from the sort of thing that RIM wants in its tablet, according to Bloomberg. µ
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I agree completely. QNX is a great OS. I first worked with it in the late 1980s and it was far and away the best option for a real multitasking OS that ran on PC-level hardware back then.
Me and a cohort liked its design so much that we implemented a high speed distributable message passing API for Win32 operating systems and it works really well for our applications.
Such a pity that QNX doesn't do more to capture market share, it is pretty clearly a better design (microkernel) than Linux. Too many Linux drivers+apps out there and not enough or the QNX flavor available, unfortunately.
Maybe RIM will surprise everyone and get QNX out there to the masses. I just hope if QNX doesn't make it in the commercial market that RIM (or whoever happens to own them at the time) open-sources it so that it doesn't completely die, that would be a shame indeed.