Although BBX would’ve sounded highly state-of-the-art for the new-generation BlackBerry gizmos, a recent court ruling has barred RIM from using the trademark for its upcoming operating system.

A court in Albuquerque, New Mexico has granted a temporary restraining order against RIM in favor of BASIS International Ltd’s claims toward the use of the brand name. As it turned out, BBX was developed by BASIS (a software provider that largely caters to corporate clients) way back in October 1985, and still runs in a lot of today’s popular desktops, smartphones and tablet pc’s.

In the wake of the US Federal court’s decision, RIM has officially announced its upcoming operating system at the recently held BlackBerry DevCon Asia. The BlackBerry OS 10, as it will now be called, is derived from RIM’s own BB OS integrated to the much-famed QNX platform. Users have had a taste of its smooth interface in the original BlackBerry Playbook released this year. At the conference held in Singapore, RIM announced that the new software will be a “single, converged” platform that will power not just its PlayBook but also the new-generation smartphones, much like the other tech giants’ OS’s–Android and iOS–running across all their respective devices.

This giant leap from RIM, on one hand, could mean that the next generation smartphones may not be released until the latter part of 2012 as, according to some sources, the demand of the new operating platform will require at least a dual-core processor and a higher-resolution screen to take advantage of the BB QNX capabilities (also check BlackBerry Milan entry by Jebus; Dec 10).

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With the announcement of the BlackBerry OS 10, some are wondering where OS 8 and 9 fit in the picture. Perhaps it will be good to note that when RIM came out with its OS 7 devices (running on a faster machine, albeit a single-core processor), the earlier BlackBerry units did not receive any legacy support. As it stands, these OS 7 smartphones could possibly not receive the OS 10 upgrade either (once the OS officially comes out) and may be left instead with eventual OS 8 and 9 updates.

Well, fact of the matter is, whether its BBX, or OS 10; whether it has legacy support or none, 2012 has to be a redeeming year for RIM. With the recent issues that rocked its boat, the Canadian company needs to keep itself above water as consumers demand more and more from these gadgets they utilize daily.

(Photos from Google. No copyright infringement intended in the use of the images)