Research In Motion talked-up the developer options for its newly-announced BlackBerry PlayBook device, with Dan Dodge, co-founder and CEO of operating platform developer QNX, taking to the stage at the 2010 BlackBerry Developer Conference to tout the potential of the BlackBerry Tablet OS. Currently, however, the development options are somewhat limited: Web applications with HTML5, and Web applications with Flash, are the only options listed on RIM’s developer page for the device. RIM recently announced a new BlackBerry Web development environment, called BlackBerry WebWorks, which will enable the creation of apps for BlackBerry smartphones and the tablet. The BlackBerry Developer’s Blog says a virtual machine supporting BlackBerry OS6 apps is in the pipeline, although it did not state when this will be available.

The app creation options for the BlackBerry PlayBook are being closely watched by the developer community because it is expected that the QNX-based platform used will form the basis of the next-generation BlackBerry smartphone platform. While QNX is widely used in embedded systems including in-car entertainment systems, power station management applications and Cisco network routers, it is largely an unknown quantity in the device world. According to a recent analysis, RIM has something of a challenge on its hands in attracting developers to its tablet platform: interest is at the same level as for HP’s anticipated, but as yet unannounced, WebOS devices, with significantly less support exhibited than for Apple’s iPad iOS variant or Android for tablets.

Dodge says that QNX is a POSIX-certified platform, and therefore shares the same system APIs as used in Linux and OSX – “in a world of large open-source projects like WebKit, this is incredibly important to dramatically reduce the cost of porting and keeping those ports up-to-date.” He also said that the OS is “based on a microkernel architecture that is perhaps the most advanced operating system in the world. We talk about multi-core, symmetrical multi-processing: we designed that in from day one.” A native SDK will be available “right out of the gate,” offering full POSIX compatibility and OpenGL high-performance graphics support.

The performance of Flash was trumpeted, including support for Adobe’s AIR runtime environment, which enables Flash content to run as standalone apps, separately from the web browser. Dodge says: “QNX and Adobe, we worked very closely together and we did an integration right down to the core of both our products, enabling optimisation and hardware acceleration every step of the way. This is going to be an unforgettable experience.”

While the device has a consumer-friendly feature set, RIM is (unsurprisingly) targeting it squarely at an enterprise user base. Mike Lazaridis, president and co-CEO of Research In Motion, said: “Recently, CIOs have been asking us to ‘amplify’ BlackBerry, they’ve been asking us to make it work with larger screens. They wanted to be able to see full documents, presentations, spreadsheets, pictures, videos. They wanted an uncompromised web experience that  not only included HTML5 but also Flash 10.1. And they wanted us to leverage their investment in the BB server platform around the world. The BlackBerry PlayBook, just like the BlackBerry smartphones, will become the enterprise standard.”