RIM Announces BlackBerry 7 OS

RIM yesterday announced two new devices BlackBerry Bold 9900 and 9930 along with new Operating System labelled BlackBerry 7.

The bad news is there is no legacy support for this new OS which means you can install on older devices.

This updated OS includes voice-activated search, corporate/personal separation of data through Balance, new productivity apps preloaded, and the browser has a few enhancements, with HTML5 video, and “Liquid Graphics”.

Additionally, RIM also announced two new devices – BlackBerry Bold 9900 and 9930 Smartphones claiming to be thinnest and most powerful featuring the renowned keyboard with Touch screen and new BlackBerry 7 OS.

From the press release –

BlackBerry 7
The BlackBerry 7 OS is designed to power the new performance-driven BlackBerry Bold platform. It provides an easier and faster user experience with improved browsing, voice-activated searches, the ability to manage personal content separately from corporate content, as well as additional personal and productivity apps out of the box.

The BlackBerry Browser has been significantly enhanced in BlackBerry 7. In addition to the general performance gains of Liquid Graphics, which helps deliver faster rendering and seamless panning and zooming, the BlackBerry 7 browser includes a new JIT (just in time) JavaScript compiler to improve the load time speed of web pages. The new browser also includes support for additional HTML5 elements, such as HTML5 Video.

Building upon the Universal Search feature introduced in BlackBerry 6, BlackBerry 7 expands the capability to include voice-activated search. This new capability makes it even easier and more convenient to search for content on the smartphone or web.

BlackBerry 7 also integrates BlackBerry® Balance™, which separates personal content from corporate content on the smartphone, giving users the freedom and flexibility to use the handset for personal email, Facebook®, Twitter®, multimedia, games and other apps while satisfying the very real need for corporate data to be highly secure and manageable. BlackBerry Balance works in conjunction with BlackBerry® Enterprise Server 5.0.3, which provides a number of unique IT policy controls such as wiping only corporate data from the handset or blocking work related content and apps from being copied or forwarded to personal contacts.

With BlackBerry 7 on the BlackBerry Bold 9900 and 9930 smartphones, users will also get the full version of Docs To Go® with all "premium" features enabled out-of-the-box so that users can easily work with Word, Excel and PowerPoint files directly on the smartphone. Docs To Go also includes a native PDF viewer.

Unfortunately, there will be no legacy support with BB7, meaning that older devices (even those running v6), won’t be getting any official updates.

This has been justified by how tightly integrated the software build is with the underlying graphics hardware in the touch-capable Bold handsets. Basically, the old phones won’t be able to run the new OS.