Research In Motion (RIM) on Tuesday set out to rev up its BlackBerry and PlayBook lines with a tactic from Apple's winning playbook -- sexy, entertaining software applications.
Co-chief executive Mike Lazaridis opened a major RIM developers conference here with a humble acknowledgement that the company stumbled with a recent BlackBerry service outage and quickly shifted to talk of an upbeat future.
"The worldwide outages we experienced were unfortunate," Lazaridis said during an opening presentation at the BlackBerry DevCon Americas gathering.
"We restored full service as quickly as we could," he said. "Now, we are focused on making things right for our more than 70 million BlackBerry users."
Lazaridis then unveiled a next-generation BlackBerry BBX platform designed to let developers build rich, quick applications to run on RIM smartphones and its PlayBook tablet computers.
RIM has sold 165 million BlackBerry smartphones and more than a billion applications have been downloaded from RIM's online App World, according to Lazaridis.
The launch of the new BlackBerry 7 line of handsets was touted as the best in the company's history.
Lazaridis said that BBX, named in tribute to its combination of BlackBerry and QNX Software Systems technology, provides a powerful new platform for developers for programs focus on anything from work to games.
"BBX is a single unified platform for the entire world -- phones, tablets, and millions of inventive devices we use every day of our lives," said QNX chief executive Dan Dodge.
"You get reliability and security; our architecture is safe by design."