RIM Forced To Rename BBX By US Court

Steve McCaskill,

A US Federal Court has granted an injunction preventing RIM from using the BBX trademark

RIM has suffered yet another blow with the news that it cannot call its next-generation mobile operating system BBX.

Software company Basis International has been granted a temporary restraining order against RIM by a US Federal Court in Albuquerque, New Mexico, which prevents RIM from using its BBX trademark.

Legal Action

Basis International claims that the BBX name is protected by trademarks it holds and had been threatening legal action for some time. RIM had planned to use the trademark at its Asian DevCon conference this week, but now appears resigned to its fate, and plans to name its new operating system Blackberry 10.

“RIM doesn’t typically comment on pending litigation, however, RIM has already unveiled a new brand name for its next generation mobile platform. As announced at DevCon Asia, RIM plans to use the BlackBerry 10 brand name for its next generation mobile platform,” RIM said.

This is the latest in a series of misfortunes to befall RIM in the last few days, with one of its executives unable to leave Indonesia following a stampede at a BlackBerry product launch, another two executives’ forcing a plane to be diverted, and reports of significant losses on its Blackberry PlayBook tablet.

Artist Formerly Known as BBX

Blackberry hopes that its new operating system will allow it to compete against rivals such as the iPhone 4S and Android devices which have slowly eroded its market share.

Precious few details have emerged about the QNX-based operating system, but in October, RIM stated that it would support applications for the Playbook, including native SDK, Adobe Air, Flash and HTML5.

Last week, rumours suggested that the first device running the software previously known as BBX would be called Surfboard. Leaked images that claimed to show the device surfaced earlier this year and the phone is expected to have a dual core 1.5GHz processor, an eight megapixel rear camera and will be “roughly the same size” as the Samsung Galaxy SII.

However an analyst has warned that phones running BBX may be delayed until the second half of 2012, forcing new BlackBerry’s to rely on the existing Blackberry OS in the near future. This would be a disappointment for RIM as the current BlackBerry 7 OS was envisaged to be only a stopgap platform.