Research in Motion can't catch a break. After the lackluster release of its BlackBerry PlayBook tablet and a massive three-day outage, the company is now facing a trademark challenge over its recently introduced BBX platform.
New Mexico-based Basis International said in a Thursday statement that it has taken "swift legal action" against RIM to protect its trademarked BBx products.
"We have thousands of product licenses installed worldwide with the 'BBX' prefix that run on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, and other proprietary UNIX OSs from IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and SUN, with mobile clients running Apple iOS, Google Android, and Windows Mobile," Basis chairman Nico Spence said in a statement. "We are fielding numerous customer inquiries voicing their confusion about the RIM announcement."
Basis did not elaborate on what type of legal action it took, but Reuters reported that the company's patent attorney sent RIM a cease and desist letter that requested a response by October 31.
"RIM has not yet received a copy of the legal complaint described in Basis International's press release, but we do not believe the marks are confusing, particularly since our respective companies are in different lines of business," the company said in a statement.
"Ironically, BASIS' BBx may aid RIM in its quest to grab a share of the application market for mobile devices in that any application created with BASIS' BBx for the Android or iOS mobile devices will also run on BlackBerry products," Spence continued.
RIM unveiled BBX at this week's DevCon conference. The OS features HTML 5 support, robust security, and a commitment to open standards. It combines the company's RIM BlackBerry 7 OS and the QNX OS from the PlayBook. Going forward, BBX will be the OS of choice on RIM's smartphones, mobile devices, and embedded systems.