Research in Motion just pushed BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0 out the door in February, but the company may already be working on the next version of the 7 inch tablet’s operating system.
Web browser benchmarking site HTML5 Test shows some new results for “RIM Tablet OS 2.1,” and the good news is that the browser appears to score higher than any almost other tablet web browser.
As the folks at n4bb point out, there’s also a listing for BlackBerry 10 on the BlackBerry PlayBook.
BlackBerry 10 is expected to be the first version of the BlackBerry operating system to run on both phones and tablets. In other words, it’s sort of the Android 4.0 of the BlackBerry world.
If RIM is really working on both projects independently, it would suggest that PlayBook OS 2.1 could hit the streets before BlackBerry 10 is available for the tablet.
It’s also possible that the two operating systems are actually different builds of the same OS and the reason they’re showing up separately at the benchmarking website is because RIM developers are testing tablets with older builds as well as newer versions of the software.
Aside from a web browser that handles HTML5 a little better than the PlayBook OS 2.0 browser, it’s not clear what other improvements we may see in the next version of RIM’s tablet operating system.
Yup, 381 up from 354 (pre-2.0 score) to reclaim its crown as present best mobile browser.Â
Add it’s the only mobile browser that will continue to support Flash fully for the foreseeable future, as RIM said it will handle porting the updates itself, for a little extra edge. Since even with the growing HTML5 dominance it’ll still be years before Flash can be fully replaced and the Playbook Browser already handles Flash better than most mobile devices.
However, the one thing I hope they improve is the bookmark system needs better customization and organizational options. Since right now you have few options.