| From: Christopher Browne via talk <talk@gtalug.org> | The Playbook was interesting in this regard; the kernel was QNX, but it had | an Android | layer, The Playbook ran proto BB10 OS. BB promised an update to BB10 but reneged. That was the first and last BB product I purchased. Grrr. Like Palm/HP WebOS, their phone/tablet OS was fine but their ecosystem attracted few 3rd party developers. So only a minority of consumers saw the value. Adding an emulator has often seemed to be a sign of a company with trouble attracting developers. And that strategy doesn't work because it gives the developers an easy way of supporting the hardware without committing to it. An exception: if the company owns the new platform and the emulated platform. Examples: Windows emulating DOS, 64-bit x86 emulating 32-bit x86, 32-bit x86 emulating 16-bit x86. Another exception: if the emulation is a lot cheaper than the real thing. Think of the Multics emulator on your PC. Or the terminal emulator. BlackBerry also sells software for enterprises to manage phones and things. I think that they even do OK (too lazy to check). QNX is (I think) quite a solid system. It has a serious niche in the automotive world. My guess is that it will be crushed by Linux. - QNX is better for real-time things - QNX can be a lot leaner than Linux - Linux's development model is a lot better for collaboration and for innovation without permission. BB does use Linux internally. Or did, last time I knew anything about them. I don't see how that could change.