By now, you know all about BlackBerry 10, with its myriad gestures, its bustling notifications Hub, and the BlackBerry Balance mode, which separates work-centric applications and accounts from personal ones. You may also be aware that BlackBerry is hedging its bets on these features, which are the main attractions behind the newly overhauled mobile operating system. All of these features are made possible by QNX’s real-time operating system—one that the Canada-based company takes great pride in.
BlackBerry (née RIM) acquired QNX Systems in April 2010 with the intention of gaining a major foothold in the automotive industry. Although QNX has its hand in several automotive projects—the QNX Car Platform 2.0 is featured in the Bentley Continental GT, for instance, and the software has historically been embedded in the control systems of other high-end luxury vehicles—BlackBerry’s focus, for now, remains on its mobile devices, and it’s using this acquisition to hold on to its relevance in the mobile operating system wars.
While BlackBerry 10 still hasn’t officially debuted in the United States, we thought we’d take a look at the framework behind BlackBerry 10 and see how the company’s acquisition of this real-time operating system has been implemented in its new OS.
It started with the PlayBook

The seven-inch PlayBook was the initial debut of the QNX kernel on a BlackBerry device. It had been designed with a custom user interface to work in conjunction with a tethered BlackBerry handset (the tablet didn’t even have its own native e-mail client) but the PlayBook wasn’t exactly a bestseller.
Regardless, it was still the beginning of the QNX revolution for BlackBerry and was essentially a test subject for the company to discover how it would move forward with its new acquisition. In October 2011, BlackBerry announced that it would fuse together the best parts of its BlackBerry OS with the QNX operating system featured on the PlayBook. Then-CEO Mike Lazaridis had said that the software, initially dubbed BBX, was intended to make it easier for developers to write applications that work interchangeably on both BlackBerry phones and tablets, and that “the whole company is aligning behind this single platform and single vision.”
“PlayBook was a big step in that journey [to BlackBerry 10],” said Sebastien Marineau, senior vice president of QNX Engineering and BlackBerry OS, in a phone interview with Ars. “It was more than just QNX—it was really a reinvention of the software platform for RIM.”
Full Story: From the car to your phone: How BlackBerry ported over QNX for its new OS | Ars Technica.