BlackBerry OS 6.1 announced

BlackBerry's first DevCon Asia took place from the 13th to the 14th of January 2011 at Bali Indonesia. This event hosted the announcement of BlackBerry OS 6.1 which was presented during the keynote at the opening day.

Version 6.1 is said to build on Blackberry OS 6 and introduce some new features for developers to take advantage of.

BlackBerry OS 6.1 has the following features:

• Magnetometer / Digital Compass APIs
• Open GL-ES 2.0
• Window API
• Event Based Geo-fencing location APIs
• Enhancements to barcode APIs for additional formats and custom decoding.

The developer tools will soon be available at BlackBerry's developer site allowing developers to prepare for the release of BlackBerry OS 6.1 in the coming months.

It was expected that the future BlackBerry smartphones will be powered by the QNX based platform that is available on the BlackBerry PlayBook, but looks that future is still some time away as RIM continues to work on updating it's BlackBerry OS platform.