Blackberry Operating system OS is a proprietary mobile operating system, developed for the Blackberry line of smartphone handhelds. The operating system provides multitasking and supports specialized input devices that have been adopted for use in RIM handhelds, particularly the trackwheel, trackball and most recently, the trackpad and touchscreen.
Research in Motion Limited (RIM) is a Canadian telecommunication and wireless device company best known as the developer of the Blackberry smartphone, The Blackberry dominates the smartphone market in North America and has a 55 per cent market share in the region. Globally, it is far behind Symbian, remaining second with 19 per cent market share and 1050 million devices sold in the first quarter of 2010. This OS is focused on easy operation and was originally designed for business use. Recently, it has seen a surge in third party applications and has been improved to offer full multimedia support.
Unfortunately, Blackberry OS does not provide a great environment for creating truly cool third party software. Many are of the opinion that the OS is a mess of Java APIs that have encrusted over various years on top of an ancient real time operating system (RTOS) core. Also, many developers seem to lack the enthusiasm to create 3D games and augmented reality experiences made available on the iPhone, Android, or even Windows Phone 7. The result is that RIM is way behind the curve when it comes to having a rich array of consumer focused applications. In a World where smartphone platforms live and die on the strength of there third party app communities, RIM has to refocus its OS priorities in order to avoid being reduced to selling messaging phones.
However all does not seem lost as the existing RIM applications are written in Java. This is a potential life saver as a new Blackberry applications in a virtual-machine compatibility layer, while offering new APIs that allow programmers to create much better software in the future.