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Tech Report: RIM To Roll Out New BlackBerry Operating System

SAN FRANCISCO (KCBS) - Research In Motion announced Tuesday it would soon release a new operating system to encourage developers to create applications for the PlayBook Tablet that are more compatible with the Blackberry.

RIM CEO Mike Lazardis started the keynote address where he hyped the new software, known as BlackberryBBX, with another apology for the 3-day outage the week before.

Lazardis and others at the company tried to strike an upbeat note at the Blackberry Developers Conference in San Francisco. RIM, after all, has the 2nd most popular applications store on the Web and 70 million Blackberry subscribers around the globe, to hear the boasts.

And it plans to give away more than $100-worth of software to compensate users for the massive outage. That public relations strategy may not be enough though.

"When you talk to the analysts and you look at the numbers, you realize things are not all that great," said KCBS technology analyst Larry Magid.

Outage aside, Magid pointed out that BlackberryBBX runs the risk of being overshadowed by the iPhone 4S and a new version of Google's Android mobile operating system known as Ice Cream Sandwich to be unveiled on Wednesday.

KCBS Technology Analyst Larry Magid:

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