BlackBerry Manufacturer RIM Forced by Court Injunction to Drop 'BBX' Name From Upcoming Software

A court has ruled that BlackBerry manufacture Research in Motion cannot use the name 'BBX' for its upcoming smartphone software, as another company owns the trademark.

RIM announced in November that its next operating system would be called BBX, but soon after a software company called Basis International claimed that it owned the rights to the BBX name and on Wednesday a US federal court agreed.

The BlackBerry maker may well have known that it would lose the rights to BBX and so late on Tuesday night the company said: "RIM doesn't typically comment on pending litigation, however RIM has already unveiled a new brand name for its next generation mobile platform."

The injunction means that BlackBerry will be unable to use the BBX name at its Asian DevCon conference on Wednesday and Thursday.

"As announced at DevCon Asia, RIM plans to use the 'BlackBerry 10' brand name for its next generation mobile platform."

It's been a bad week for RIM, with the Canadian firm announcing a huge write-off on its PlayBook tablet which has failed to sell - shifting just 150,000 units in the same quarter that Apple sold 11 million iPads.

On Tuesday the company announced that it has sacked two executives, after a flight they were on was diverted allegedly due to the RIM employees being drunk and behaving 'mischievously'; on Monday evening BBC Newsnight blamed BlackBerry devices in part for the riots that struck London and other cities in August.

BlackBerry will be hoping that, whatever the name, its new operating system will inject some life back into the smartphone brand, which has seen a torrid year resulting in a 70 per cent drop in its share price over 12 months.

In October the company suffered a three-day data outage, preventing tens of millions of customers from being able to access the internet, email, contacts, calendars and BlackBerry Messenger.