RIM Forced to Drop BBX Name, Goes With "10" Instead

A temporary restraining order was issued against Research in Motion that prevents the company from using the name "BBX" for its new OS platform.

A court sided with Basis, which sued RIM earlier on claims that BBX infringes on Basis' registered trademark. In its ruling, the court stated that it granted the temporary restraining order as Basis "is likely to prevail on its trademark infringement claim" since it has an "incontestable federally registered trademark" that covers the BBX mark. The court also said that consumers may confuse Basis' BBX product with RIM's BBX OS.

Specifically, the temporary order prevents RIM from using the BBX name at the DevCon Asia event. Strangely enough, RIM argued in this case that DevCon Asia is primarily targeted at Asians and should be allowed to use BBX as a result as Basis does not have a strong presence in Asia. In the big picture that may not have been a very compelling reason to keep using the BBX name.

Basis claims that there is an installaed base of "thousands" of Basis products that carry a "BBx" prefix. Basis, however, does not explicitly use the name BBx, but replaces the "x" with a letter signifying the current version of BBx. For example, the current version of the software is BBj. BBj is an object-oriented development environment for Oracle's Java Virtual Machine.

RIM already reacted to the ruling and announced via a tweet that "BlackBerry 10" is the "official name" of its next generation platform. And the Roman numeral for 10 is... X!