QNX Phones........What's the big deal ?

[EchoTango]

I've been watching the traffic regarding QNX, with folks saying how great it is, how it will save RIM and the utility of the OS. I know it's in cars, nuclear power plants and all sorts of exotic places. Multi-core support is often touted as the main reason, but do users really care how many cores they are running (and consuming the battery) ?

Looking at BB7 in relation to IOS and Android, it seems to me that it generally stacks up pretty well with these devices and is now (at least) on par with these other handsets OS's. I'm not seeing any major deficiencies, in fact it has arguably more function once you add the traditional BB services like BES, BIS and BBM. New technologies like NFC and bar codes are coming, but these already run on OS7.

So my question is; what is QNX going to add to the features/functions that isn't there today that can't be enabled using the OS7 or it's future iterations ? What's the "wiz bang" application(s) that QNX is going to facilitate ?

[kjmenzel]

Well, judging from comments on this site, there are at least a few people who put a lot of stock on how many cores their phone has, and there are probably enough consumers that, knowing little, would compare that as a metric for how good a phone is.

If the API is better for QNX, then developers will be able to do cooler things. I think that'll be the main difference... as it seems (from the Playbook apps so far released) that the API has allowed app creators to make the pretty apps that look nice AND do stuff. Some of that might be possible on the OS7 devices though (I'd imagine a lot of that has to do with having a dedicated GPU, and if I'm not mistaken the OS7 devices finally have one, don't they??)

[meske]

Yeah, I think QNX is more familiar with devs, as its a unix base (aka android).

BBOS was built for secure messaging and running java apps, but it was more centered to "business apps" that typically do not have great graphics/processor needs. To compete in the consumer world, people want a device that can do it all. BBOS 6 and 7 do a good job, but the OS was not originally designed for it, and therefor you run into limitations.

Just like RIM was knocking Apple for not having a "true multi tasking OS" and stating that QNX was built from the ground up with that in mind, same goes for iOS / Android compared to BBOS - the iOS and Android OS's were built to do gaming/computing/data well, and security and multi-tasking were built in later.

Compare this approach to Microsoft. They were one of the first to have a graphical / touch UI on their phones. Problem was, they built an ecosystem that they could not easily upgrade to without requiring developers to go back to the drawing board on their apps. But, they made the decision that they were going to fail absolutely without making that change, hence WP7. Now they've got a new base to build on that should last them years.

[southlander]

RIM has implied it is better because they are moving everything in that direction. Other than that, I have seen very little on here from experts about the actual technical reasons QNX will enable new features that are not possible now on the Java ME based OS. It is "common" knowledge that QNX is very efficient, stable, can scale and all that. But that is nothing specific.

The PlayBook is currently all the hard evidence we have on what RIM can make a QNX based OS do.

In fact, while I love the PlayBook I would have some questions about it (for RIM) that will go unanswered. For example why is memory footprint so large for the base OS? So then if the answer is -- because it needs to be -- I would wonder about the new QNX phones as well.

[the_sleuth]

Blackberry Tablet OS (or QNX OS) means more APIs and more tools for developers, such as WebWorks, Adobe Air, and soon, a new Native Development Kit.

These tools level the competitive landscape with iOS and Android. In the next 18 months, there are going to be some great apps developed for Blackberry Tablet OS and QNX OS in general.

[southlander]

Originally Posted by the_sleuth

Blackberry Tablet OS (or QNX OS) means more APIs and more tools for developers, such as WebWorks, Adobe Air, and soon, a new Native Development Kit.

These tools level the competitive landscape with iOS and Android. In the next 18 months, there are going to be some great apps developed for Blackberry Tablet OS and QNX OS in general.

So then part of its superiority is just the fact that it allowed RIM to include more modern tools for development, then?

[EchoTango]

Just to "nudge" the discussion......I think we should focus on comparing OS7 and QNX which has liquid graphics, better screen displays and improved web browsing.

Again what's coming that QNX will enable, other than better SDK, which of course is important. I suspect it may have something to do with "machine virtualization" where the QNX OS can emulate Android or even (heaven forbid !) IOS. This then allows access the app catalogs for either platform.

Wouldn't that be interresting.......

[donpeppino9]

BBOS doesn't have the ability to allow apps to be stored on anything but flash memory... at least RIM hasn't been able to. QNX fixes that. more app storage will allow developers to make better apps that require more memory.

[Umm Yeah...]

Everyone above has stated quite nicely why RIM has decided to move to QNX but they haven't addressed why consumers and BB fanboys are clamoring for the QNX based BBs.

Quite frankly, it is because RIM has said that going forward, all BB's will be running QNX. That means that all of those who want to stay with BB don't want to buy the last version of the outgoing OS because it will have limited support. Everyone wants to have the OS with a future and not an OS that is being orphaned.

[EchoTango]

Since I started this thread, I've been learning more about QNX and I've come to the conclusion that QNX's most important new feature is symmetrical multi-processing (SMP).

This opens up many possibilities for designing apps that can run in the background monitoring other applications while not impacting the main communications functions. Also it enables virtualization tasks to run in the background emulating Android or other technologies.

Imagine watching a movie and taking a call or emailing all at the same time.

[FunktasticLucky]

QNX is a pretty neat system actually. It can plug modules into it to expand it. The underlying kernal just starts the modules up as needed. No Reboot is necessary. It goes right in. It's also stable because if the module fails then the kernal has the ability to shut it down and restart it without crashing the entire system. whcih makes it nice for phones as well. Because now you can expand the kernal with things for phones and tablets with easy. no more Fully custom OS's. I think RIM will do great things once they finish their new devices to support QNX and I really believe they have a truely bright future.

[FourOhFour]

Originally Posted by southlander

In fact, while I love the PlayBook I would have some questions about it (for RIM) that will go unanswered. For example why is memory footprint so large for the base OS? So then if the answer is -- because it needs to be -- I would wonder about the new QNX phones as well.

You could always check out memory usage on an idle Linux system running a GUI for comparison. Or heck.. install QNX on a desktop machine and see for yourself Let's just do some back-of-the-envelope calculations for fun...

-graphics: ~1MPix main display, ~2MPix HDMI output @ 32-bit: 4/8MB per on-screen frame. Assuming double-buffering as a minimum, that's 8 or 16MB just to service the screen. If both video outputs active, 24MB. That's just the immediate display requirements. Expect multiple additional buffers required for each application, composited layer, including the navigator. Assume the navigator has at least 2 layers - background, foreground. etc. etc. etc. This memory will probably have to be reserved up front by the system.. say 32-64MB as per a typical graphical UI.

-filesystem: expect caching to be enabled for the filesystem, let's say something like 8MB reserved for this. Could be more, could be less.

-network: expect several MB to be reserved for buffering the network stack. say 8MB?

-kernel structures: QNX is a microkernel OS, so not too much taken up by the kernel proper. Just process management, memory management, etc. Assuming 4KB memory pages, there are 262144 such pages to track. Depending on the details, assume at least 4MB (although this could be on-core MMU memory, not general purpose).

-processes: Assume something like 16KB stack per process. Given QNX runs all it's drivers (filesystems, networking, usb, spi, i2c, dma, gps, accelerometers, bluetooth, bridge, timers, power management, touchscreen, audio, camera, samba, filesystems, etc.) as user processes and each of those processes has multiple threads, assume at least a few hundred threads on an idle system. This accounts for several more MB. (400 threads = 6+MB). That's before heap allocations, libraries, etc. Add many more MB (assume at least 16KB for libc alone, per process).

-ram filesystems: temporary storage (non-flash) requires a ramdisk or similar. Assume a few MB there.

-multimedia: let's assume some multimedia services are active in the background... audio I/O for system sounds (a meg or two), pre-load some video services (dozen megs?), camera drivers (dozen megs?)

-adobe: assume adobe flash runtime environment is always running. Flash is a bit of a hog, but admittedly has a LOT of work to do. I'd expect 50+ MB here based on other platforms.

The list goes on and on...

Bear in mind that it's not necessarily a BAD THING to be using several hundred MB when a system is idle. In fact, to optimize for runtime performance, you're typically better served by consuming as much memory as possible up front in order to save on loading time later. This is the reasoning behind starting up common components like the Flash environment early and centralizing the memory footprint of common functions (like an audio mixer for example).

[eKafara]

From what I understand Java is what causes the memory leak in the BB phones we use right now. So I'm thinking this will mean no more memory leak, so no more battery pulls that will make me pretty happy.

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[123berryaddicted]

BBOS7 vs QNX:

One thing is for sure. When the first QNX phone comes out, it more than likely will be missing many key bb features that your current bbOS has. QNX in the long run will be good, but its going to take some time for RIM to implement all those "blackberry" features that we've all come to love. Its been how long for the playbook OS tablet?? And we still don't have MOST features found on our bb handsets - don't expect much different for the Colt released.

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[FunktasticLucky]

What you seem to forget is that the colt doesn't release for another 6 or 7 months most likely. And the playbook is about to get a lot of those features that are missing. Also qnx is making all OS's the same. So the playbook and phone OS's will be have the same features as the tablet. Well besides adding the phone portion and things of that nature. The playbook has come a LONG way. And 2.0 is a huge step when it releases. So all that integrated email and app player should already be implemented in the OS. No more fully custom OS's for each device. I think people need to stop being so negative here.

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