Research in Motion (RIM) has unveiled a new mobile operating system that hopes to bring app developers to the fold of BlackBerry smartphones and tablets.

In the company's annual developer conference in San Francisco, RIM co-CEO Mike Lazaridis said the BBX OS offers developers the best of both BlackBerry and QNX OS because it will be easier for them to build apps and sell these on the BlackBerry App World.

The BBX supports BlackBerry cloud services and apps developed using such tools as Native SDK, Adobe AIR/Flash and WebWorks/HTML5 and BlackBerry Runtime for Android Apps. BBX will also include the BlackBerry Cascades UI Framework for advanced graphics.

"At DevCon today, we're giving developers the tools they need to build richer applications and we're providing direction on how to best develop their smartphone and tablet apps as the BlackBerry and QNX platforms converge into our next-generation BBX platform," Lazaridis said Tuesday, according to Siliconrepublic.com.

RIM said it has updated WebWorks for BlackBerry smartphones and tablets and the Native SDK for the BlackBerry PlayBook. It will also make a beta of its PlayBook OS 2.0 available to developers.

The latest BlackBerry WebWorks SDK 2.2 supports apps built on HTML5, CSS and JavaScript allowing developers to work on both BlackBerry smartphone and PlayBook platforms. RIM is making available on WebWorks Developer site a Ripple Emulator beta for testing and debugging their applications on multiple platforms and devices without having to compile or launch simulators.

The Native SDK allows development of high-performance, multi-threaded, native C/C++ applications; advanced 2D and 3D games; and other apps and application programming interfaces or APIs.