Leon Cooperman of Omega Advisors, has been buying into Research in Motion (RIM) stock on a belief that the new QNX-based operating system will exceed expectations and a takeover of RIM is likely. Both ideas carry significant risks.

In our view, currently there are few potential buyers for RIM. Microsoft is committed to its own platform, so is Google. Nokia is itself in flux and so is HP, and a merger with Samsung of Korea or ZTE of China is highly unlikely, not to mention the fact that it would hardly address the issues at RIM. What RIM needs is a fairly radical surgery and a restructuring. The company may need to go private and change senior management to achieve that. All this translates into more time and more uncertainty. A private equity bid is still likely, but the price may be modest, given the heavy lifting involved in a turnaround.

The new Blackberry OS, regardless of its technical capability will take longer to attract apps developers than RIM and some buy-side optimists expect. RIM is still fourth behind Apple iOS, Google Android and Microsoft in terms of mobile application developer priorities. The new Microsoft environment appeared to be making inroads into Blackberry turf, but now, some field checks suggest that the uptake of the new Windows phones is still very modest. At the same time, there is strong evidence that HP will likely work very closely with Microsoft in trying to push the new mobile Windows OS into enterprise tablet environments.

The baseline operating system, - QNX is not new, - it has been around for over 25 years and is stable, well tested and is in many ways technically superior to others in the mobile market. QNX offers multiprocessing, true memory protection, ability to distribute workloads across processor boundaries and across networks. But RIM will have to do a lot of work in adapting QNX and its development tools to the modern mobile environment.

QNX was not originally built for smart phones, but rather to support real-time processing in embedded computer systems in automotive and other markets where a user interface was often very simple. While QNX internal performance may be a paragon of efficiency, its ability to serve up rich interactive user experiences remains a question mark. If RIM pulls it off and comes up with a robust revision of mobile apps development tools and Android migration solutions, then it will get another chance at a real recovery. In the meantime, the long-awaited RIM tools for migrating Android apps from the current BB OS are now available (some in beta) but the numerous provisos and user interface incompatibility issues between Android and Blackberry make these a tough sell.  In the meantime, the Blackberry apps and OS platform looks very messy for both developers and buyers. The bottom line issue is time, - it may take RIM six to twelve months to get all of its new assets in place for another competitive battle in 2012 but that is a millennia in mobile computing time.