The WSJ published an interesting article today about RIM and its future plans. For one thing, they’re saying RIM’s tablet device is slated to release in the 4th quarter of this year and could be announced as early as next week at DevCon 2010.

Even more interesting is the speculation that the tablet will run on a QNX OS. There’s been talks of RIM eventually moving BlackBerry smartphones over to the QNX OS since RIM acquired the company back in April. With the coming of BlackBerry 6, it seemed doubtful that we would see BlackBerrys move over to QNX anytime soon, but things may be looking better in the near future.

Now don’t forget back in March, Mike Lazaridis, co-Ceo of RIM was quoted stating:

“In addition to our interests in expanding the opportunities for QNX in the automotive sector and other markets,” Lazaridis continued, “we believe the planned acquisition of QNX will also bring other value to RIM in terms of supporting certain unannounced product plans for intelligent peripherals, adding valuable intellectual property to RIM’s portfolio and providing long-term synergies for the companies based on the significant and complementary OS expertise that exists within the RIM and QNX teams today.”

It would be very interesting to see RIM’s first tablet run on the heavily Flash based QNX OS. RIM could potentially have a successful fresh start in a new arena, which would ultimately carry over to BlackBerry smartphones and help level the playing field with Android and iOS. The tablet would also give developers plenty of time to become familiar the QNX OS before BlackBerry smartphones make the switch. Many apps for the tablet could potentially carry over to certain BlackBerry smartphones as well. Hmm. Do you think RIM has an ace in the hole?

[Source: WSJ, eWEEK]