BlackBerry moves into the next generation with new BBX platform, Cascades UI

On the first day of its BlackBerry developer conference in San Francisco, smartphone maker Research in Motion announced the next generation of BlackBerry platform will be called BBX and it will combine QNX, the platform RIM acquired in 2010 and used in the PlayBook tablet with the more traditional BlackBerry smartphone platform, a move not unlike the one Google has taken with Android "Ice Cream Sandwich."

BBX will be a complete platform made up of the operating system known as BBX-OS, and the related BlackBerry cloud services and development environments. BBX will support all the QNX tools that were used for PlayBook development, including Native SDK, Adobe AIR/Flash and WebWorks/HTML5. It will also include support for the BlackBerry Runtime for Android Apps.

RIM today showed off the core elements of the BlackBerry Cascades UI for the first time on Tuesday, which will all eventually be included in the BlackBerry Native SDK in beta version later this Fall. Shown in the video we've embedded below, Cascades supports 3D and 2D layouts, and a set of core UI components for designers to take advantage of.