"The worldwide outage was unfortunate." But RIM co-CEO Mike Lazaridis didn't spend time worrying about last week's issues.

Instead, kicking off the company's BlackBerry Developers Conference in San Francisco, he was much more focused on the future, announcing BBX, the new name for BlackBerry's QNX platform.

Combining BlackBerry existing tech and tools such as BBM, with the open source QNX platform that's powering its PlayBook tablet and new smartphones, BBX is the new consumer and developer label for the company's future push.

"We're aligning behind a single platform. BBX combines the best of BlackBerry and the best of QNX," Lazaridis explained.

Fast and safe

Bringing Dan Dodge, QNX Software's president to the stage, Dodge pointed to the system's performance and reliability.

"Our architecture is safe by design," he stressed, adding "BBX is a unified, open source platform for the entire world".

Good for games

Games were a big focus of the presentation, with Marmalade president Alex Caccia demonstrating Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light, and Unity's Tracy Erickson also on stage, both highlighting the power of game making tools on the PlayBook.

But it wasn't just about native apps. RIM is also a big supporter of HTML5.

"We're really getting behind HTML5," Lazaridis said. "HTML5 is the bridge between BBX and BB6 and BB7."

As part of this focus, there was also a demonstration of a WebGL game running hardware accelerated on the PlayBook.