Now that we’re hearing RIM may be announcing a tablet at the BlackBerry Developer Conference next week, folks are probably wondering what it will actually do. Sure, we’ve heard that it’ll be between 7″ and 8.9″, piggyback on a BlackBerry for connectivity, and use a new OS from QNX, an embedded software company RIM had recently acquired, but having seen nothing of the actual device, we don’t know if the “BlackPad” (or SurfBook, if you prefer) will be anything more than an giant BlackBerry, or if it will be a new kind of product altogether.
To illustrate some of QNX’s existing work, and what they might end up doing with the BlackBerry tablet they’re supposedly working on, some demo videos of QNX software have surfaced. The first video shows a complete in-car system that controls music (including Pandora connectivity), provides temperature control, weather information, and entertainment from YouTube and local media libraries. The demo even showed a dedicated app store for the in-car system, which could easily be transplanted to a tablet form factor that could leave a car dock once in awhile, especially if the same tie-ins could be made with QNX’s in-home smart energy interface. This software goes hand-in-hand with QNX’s LTE-connected car, which, as you can imagine, would be of interest to BlackBerry as the launch of true 4G networks approaches. Between RIM’s explicit mention of in-car functions during the acquisition, their trademarking of BlackBerry Drive, and a recent blog post from QNX detailing the interplay between smartphones and cars, it’s a given that whatever they make for BlackBerry will have some kind of automotive application.
In addition to that, QNX does a lot of work with graphics, as shown in the second video where 3D models are rendered with a 206 MHz processor. They certainly aren’t as fancy as some things we’ve seen on mobile, but given RIM’s penchant for efficiency, such technology would be a good fit in a BlackBerry tablet. On top of 3D, QNX is big on Flash support when rendering interactive 2D menus, and presumably such expertise wouldn’t only come into play in a BlackBerry tablet, but also RIM’s smartphones. The second video shows some Coverflow-style album covers, which RIM has already implemented in OS 6.
It won’t be long before we find out what exactly RIM announces next week, and how much of QNX’s previous work RIM uses, but if the rumours of a November launch of the BlackBerry tablet are true, an announcement at DevCon would make sense timeline-wise.
[via BlackBerry Forums, BerryCN]