RIM will use its PlayBook OS in smartphones

Yesterday Mike Lazaridis, who is a co-CEO at Research in Motion, revealed that the company's upcoming Playbook tablet will have a QNX-based BlackBerry Tablet OS that will eventually appear on multi-core BlackBerry smartphones and other tablets coming in the next ten years.

In his interview with Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg at D: Dive Into Mobile conference, which was taking place in San Francisco, California, Lazaridis showed RIM's upcoming 7-inch tablet and said it has "the perfect size", though the company plans to produce tablets of other sizes too.

He also said the company bets heavily on its above-mentioned Tablet OS and PlayBook.

"This is a computing platform. All of this is coming together to set up BlackBerry for the next decade".

The 7-inch PlayBook revealed by the company in September still "tracks" for a first quarter launch.

Lazaridis also told that though the company is concentrated on developing the next generation technologies for its devices, RIM will not abandon the markets where are there are still no 3G and 4G and which cannot afford high-end stuff.

Besides that, in his interview he said that BlackBerry became appealing to consumers by itself.

"We didn't go out and try to make BlackBerry a consumer device. It crossed over on its own".

In regard to Apple Lazaridis said that RIM has a different strategy. While Apple upgrades its iOS to be compatible with tablets, RIM is going to produce a tablet OS first and then bring it to smartphones. Mike doesn't also understand why Flash cannot be supported by the tablet, as that just limits the capabilities of the device.

"Why would you limit yourself?"

In October Steve Jobs said that many of the upcoming 7-inch tablets will be dead on arrival.  Jim Balsillie, who is another RIM's co-CEO, responded then:

"Many customers are getting tired of being told what to think by Apple".