During the general session of BlackBerry DevCon Asia 2011, the BlackBerry 6.1 application platform was announced by VP of Global Alliances and Developer Relations for RIM, Tyler Lessard. RIM looks to be building on OS 6 and keeping it for the long term. The new tools and APIs for 6.1 are:

• Magnetometer / Digital compass APIs
• Open GL-ES 2.0
• Window API (overlay native app surfaces)
• Event-based geo-fencing location APIs
• Enhancement to barcode API’s for additional formats and custom decoding
• and more

It wasn’t far out of mind to see RIM continuing the OS 6. It will be interesting to see how long it will take until we hit magic number 7, with QNX ‘super phones’. Nevertheless, it is still good to see RIM doing what they can to improve on OS 6.

via CB