RIM has unveiled its next-generation platform strategy with BlackBerry BBX, which combines the QNX operating system with other RIM technology. However, specific details such as launch schedules were not forthcoming.

BBX was announced by RIM president and co-CEO Mike Laziridis at the BlackBerry DevCon Americas 2011 developer conference yesterday.

“The whole company is aligning behind a single platform and vision. We’re taking the power of QNX, open standards, and the best of BlackBerry and building a powerful development platform for BlackBerry developers. Today I’m pleased to introduce our next generation platform BBX,” Laziridis said.

The BlackBerry PlayBook tablet computer is the only RIM device currently running QNX – which RIM acquired in 2010 – although it has previously been hinted that the first BlackBerry smartphone to run QNX will appear next year.

The BBX platform will include the BBX operating system as well as support for BlackBerry cloud services and HTML5 and native development environments.

The embracing of open standards with BBX will see RIM include nearly 100 system open source libraries – including C++, XML, font rendering – with the BBX portfolio.

“We’re going to take and port all the system open source libraries, we will test them, we will post them so our developers can download those libraries, they can include them as part of their application and drop them right on the device. And if we see a lot of developers using the same library, we’ll then move it into the system library so it becomes part of the base BBX platform,” QNX founder and co-developer of Dan Dodge explained.

The greater integration of HTML5 is another area which RIM is focusing on with BBX. “We’re really getting behind HTML5,” Laziridis said.

The WebWorks SDK 2.2 provides developers with a framework and APIs to build HTML5-based apps. “This is your bridge between BB6, BB7 and BBX – you write it once, you can write it everywhere. It is the next mass platform for applications,” Dodge said.

BBX also includes the BlackBerry Cascades UI framework for advanced graphics which RIM says will enable “Super App” capabilities such as deeper integration between apps and the BBM social platform.

During the DevCon presentation, Laziridis touched on the recent outage suffered by BlackBerry users. “The worldwide outages we experienced this week were unfortunate. We restored full service as quickly as we could. Now we’re focused on the root cause analysis, our internal systems audits and making this right for our more than 7 million BlackBerry users around the world,” he said.

The company recently announced it would provide BlackBerry users with US$100 worth of premium apps to make up for the disruption suffered during the outage.