As you’re sure to know, things have been quite hard for RIM as of late. While they do still have a large dedicated customer base for their BlackBerry smartphones, competing entities like Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android have been chipping away at the Canadian company’s market share on an increasing basis. Luckily, RIM has let us know that they do have tricks up their sleeve in the form of their QNX based platform powering devices like the BlackBerry PlayBook.

While we’ve known that the smartphone version of this platform won’t be dropping for quite some time, we didn’t know exactly how long it will take. Unfortunately, RIM’s Mike Lazaridis has just come forth to let us know that smartphones running BlackBerry 10 won’t be out until the end of 2012. Apparently, the problem focuses on chipsets needed to produce these phones not being available until this time period.

Will it be too late for RIM by then? Will Apple and Google already be too far ahead? We’ll have to wait and see.

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