As previously mentioned, BBX is an entirely new smartphone OS for RIM, with a different foundation, and as such, developers will need to take a different approach to BlackBerry development in the future.

Perhaps the most notable different between BlackBerry OS development and BBX development is that the BBX OS does not support applications developed using RIM's Java Development Environment (JDE), which has been widely used by RIM developers in the past to create many popular BlackBerry apps.

"This was a really tough decision," Saunders says. "We worked really hard to get the JDE environment on BBX."

But in the end it just didn't pan out, he says.