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The question is: does it make business sense for RIM to produce any more Playbooks. The market is flooded and while RIM sold a few hundred thousand others sold tens of millions of units. The market is settling in around the $200. Can RIM make any money with them? There may be a small captive market for secure government needs, but only if it provides higher security.Thread title says it all. I for one don't care about BB10 hardware. , I don't even own a smartphone. However, I do care about the continued development of the Playbook. Right now I'm fairly happy with the OS 2.1 beta. I want to see it get finished and also the one missing piece of my app puzzle, Skype, make it onto the device. But now with the delay I worry that development around the PB will stagnate. I hope this move is really about making BB10 awesome and not a sign of a slow decline that will also impact the PB and developer interest kn the overall QNX platform.
RCK
The Playbook with its present OS is competitive but few even know it exists. It is the victim of gross mismanagement by incompetent management. It is not clear that the new management understands market realities much better than the old management. Their product development cycle appears to be two to three times longer than that of their competition.Last edited by jgrobertson; 06-29-12 at 07:14 AM.
06-29-12 07:04 AM - That's right! And they also need a good eReader app if they want to tap into that market as well. And it's a huge potential market too, if they could capture even a fraction of the sales now going to the likes of the Kindle Fire.
The version of the Kobo reader available doesn't really do the trick.
You can say that RIM should hold back and wait for Apps from outside developers. But if core functionality, like eReaders, is not available then the company has to step in and make it happen!
06-29-12 07:57 AM - I see no business reason or logic for a 4G PB now. Who will buy it? What is the demand? I do not think a lot.
The current PB's hardware and specs stills compare fairly good with what is available, so if I were RIM, I would spend time (a lot) to improve and make the current 2.0+ solid to retain customer base (and hopefully grow it a little) and work in the meantime to bring out a new PB hardware with BB10 launch and then also upgrade the current PB's software to BB10. I think that is something they can sell without loosing too much (or further) market share.
In total, the current PB and BB7 phones are fairly good on the hardware side, so RIM survival should focus on updated the OS for those hardware (hopefully BB10 can be upgraded on those) and then work on some basic new hardware together with BB10 lauch.
They should NOT go for the homerun grandslam. Just do it an infield hit and score the 2 or 3 runs while keeping players on bases.Last edited by rcm1301; 06-29-12 at 09:46 AM.
06-29-12 09:34 AM - Were they sold out of the 16 gig model because they gave so many of them away for free?
I am quite puzzled that RIM would still want to continue down the road of offering an LTE Playbook. A few months ago, there were some statistics - that I can't find right now - indicating that it has proven to be difficult companies and wireless providers to convince people to get an LTE/4G tablet along with an additional price plan over and above what they are paying now. The WiFi Ipad 3, for example, out sells the 4G+WiFi version by a wide margin. Given that the economic outlooks are collapsing yet again, 4G/LTE on a tablet may be seen as a luxury only.
If the hypothesis holds true that WiFi will outsell 4G and given that RIM has only sold some 250,000+ Playbooks around the world, wouldn't it stand to reason the amount of people around the world who want a 4G version has to be smaller than 250,000? If the market is that small, then why waste resources on it?06-29-12 02:21 PM
