RIM’s take on Android: Why not both beat AND join them?

Vendors worldwide have been shedding various mobile operating systems to jump on the Android bandwagon, tapping into Google’s (NASDAQ:GOOG) ever-growing smartphone ecosystem. Research in Motion (NASDAQ:RIMM), however, is putting an interesting twist on that trend for its forthcoming PlayBook tablet. Rather than dump its own OS for Android, it’s using both, and providing an easy means for developers to port their Android and iOS apps over to the QNX platform.

At its earnings call today, RIM confirmed it would install an Android runtime on its new QNX-powered BlackBerry playbooks, effectively launching a device that can support its own apps as well as those of its competitors. In addition, the PlayBook will support apps developed in Java and its BlackBerry smartphone platform. That versatility will give RIM a bevy of apps to support its PlayBook launch in April, but ultimately RIM hopes to build its own stable of developers for QNX. To entice them, RIM is working with Ideaworks Labs, which has designed a multi-platform software development kit (SDK) that allows a developer to build an app in C or C++ and port it over to every major operating system.

The Ideaworks Airplay could open QNX to thousands of developers with tens of thousands of apps who coded their iPhone and Android apps in those programming languages. The key advantage to that approach is that the apps emerging out of Airplay will be native QNX apps with no middleware or hefty runtime separating them from the hardware and the OS.

“Performance is likely to be compromised with Android runtime on QNX, as this approach introduces another layer in the software stack on device,” Ideaworks CEO Niall Murphy said in an e-mail interview. “This will affect some applications, which needs to be factored in by developers. … The Airplay runtime is essentially native CPU instructions, and therefore the maximum possible performance is achieved.”

Ideaworks has been working closely with RIM for the last six weeks to bring QNX support to the SDK with the aim of creating a pipeline for native apps at launch. Most developers still don’t have access to RIM’s native SDK, and RIM doesn’t plan to launch a QNX beta developer program until this summer, several months after the PlayBook goes on sale.

Without the support for Airplay, Android or old BlackBerry OS apps, RIM would have risked launching a tablet with practically no applications, except for the core synchronization, e-mail and enterprise apps it has designed in house.