With new leadership RIM plans to launch 3G equipped PlayBook tablet, purportedly
Posted on 26. Jan, 2012 by Albert Madison in Tablets
Thorsten Heins, Chief Executive Office at Research In Motion. Image:RIM
Research In Motion has kicked it’s own founders out of their co-CEO positions and replaced them both with just one CEO, Thorsten Heins.
Under it’s former leaders, co-CEO’s Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie, RIM rose to the top but sadly in recent years under those same men they fell down behind new comers (Apple and Google) to the smartphone market. The steady decline increased in last year when the company lost money and marketshare in it’s bread-and-butter business of smartphones.
To add some salt to their wounds the 7″ BlackBerry PlayBook tablet that was launched by both Lazaridis and Balsillie in late 2010 failed to sell well at profitable pricing in 2011. However with the reorganization of executive leaders RIM seems to be on a path for some serious change.
Leaked roadmap shows PlayBook is still alive
As mentioned above the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet failed to attain success at profitable pricing. In late 2011 RIM threw up a white flag and dropped PlayBook tablet prices down as low as $199 for a 16GB Wi-Fi model, which is down from the $499 the company launched the base 16GB Wi-Fi model at earlier in the year.
With the PlayBook being a failure one would assume the RIM would put the tablet to rest going forward, however if a newly leaked roadmap proves accurate the company is doing anything but that. According to an internal roadmap leaked to Boy Genius Report RIM is going to keep the Wi-Fi BlackBerry PlayBook’s around through 2012 and into 2013 where they will release a “3G+” equipped BlackBerry PlayBook tablet in the first quarter of 2013 (sometime in March, April or May according to the roadmap).
The 7-inch BlackBerry PlayBook is more than one year old, counting from the time it was unveiled to the world in late 2010, already and I don’t see how RIM will be able to stay relevant in the evergrowing tablet market with only the PlayBook at their disposal. The roadmap fails to mention if RIM plans to release any other QNX based tablets to keep themselves relevant, but the roadmap does imply that RIM is going to be laser focused on smartphones for the immediate future.
I don’t think RIM staying out of tablet market in 2012 is an entirely bad thing. Leaving things alone for now could give the company a chance to develop QNX as a platform more so future BlackBerry tablets can have a better chance in the market. One issue that stopped me from getting the PlayBook even at discount pricing was the limited amount of applications and infancy of QNX as a platform. For me the PlayBook was much like the discontinued HP TouchPad (which I did buy at discounted pricing, mostly for it’s screen size), decent tablet with a very small community of app developers offering support for it.
Now the 3G model that the roadmap claims RIM will launch in 2013 baffles me. I don’t see any reason for RIM to launch a mobile broadband equipped BlackBerry PlayBook tablet at all, leave alone the idea of launching one in 2013. In 2011 carriers in the U.S. backed away from the idea of having a 3G or 4G PlayBook occupying their shelves after seeing just how weak consumer demand was for the PlayBook. I can recall Sprint and Verizon both pulling out of launching 4G equipped PlayBook tablets in 2011 after they initially showed interested in the 7-inch tablet.
RIM should sit back, watch, build QNX into the respectable platform we all know RIM can, and dream up some future tablet designs. The tablet market is growing rapidly, but waiting to launch a new model isn’t going to hurt RIM as bad as launching something prematurely again.
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One Response to “With new leadership RIM plans to launch 3G equipped PlayBook tablet, purportedly”
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Mario
28. Jan, 2012
If its just the same tab with 3g or 4g, its dead. not only is everything old but there is even less apps than android (asus transformer prime with ics whoops everything)