First BlackBerry BBX Device Will Be “Surfboard”

The first BlackBerry smartphone to be powered by the upcoming BBX operating system is now rumoured to be called the “Surfboard”.

The device was previously codenamed “London” and will be the first in a line of “superphones” that will assist BlackBerry in its battle against rival manufacturers.

Surfboard For BBX Wave

RIM first registered the “Surfboard” trademark at the Canadian Intellectual Property Office in July 2010 but has never used it and applied for an extension in May.

Images that claimed to show the device’s ultra-slim body and touchscreen surfaced on the internet earlier this year. The “Surfboard” is expected to have a dual core 1.5GHz processor, an eight megapixel rear camera and be “roughly the same size” as the Samsung Galaxy S II.

RIM hopes that the arrival of the new mobile operating system will refresh its range of BlackBerry smartphones and help to revive its ailing fortunes. BlackBerry’s market share has been eroded by competitors such as the iPhone 4S and its reputation suffered after a worldwide outage prevented many of its users from accessing data services in October.

Few details have been revealed about the QNX-based BBX operating system, but in October, RIM stated that it will support applications developed for its Blackberry Playbook tablet, including native SDK, Adobe Air, Flash and HTML5.

However an analyst has warned that the next-generation of BBX “superphones” may be delayed until the second half of 2012, forcing new BlackBerrys to rely on the existing BlackBerry OS in the near future, something that would be troublesome given that BlackBerry 7 OS was only intended as a stopgap platform.