Kind of non-news, really, but anyway:
BlackBerry 10 tablet rumour quashed, PlayBook users awaiting BB10 update | NDTV Gadgets
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Kind of non-news, really, but anyway:
BlackBerry 10 tablet rumour quashed, PlayBook users awaiting BB10 update | NDTV Gadgets
'My son - you are dead to me' seems to sum up BB's attitude to the playbook imho and I can't really understand this.
For all the naysayers - the underlying hardware on the current PB is pretty good and it's a very good form factor, but this article seems, to me at least, to say that BB is pretty much washing their hands of it and the tablet market in general.
If this is so then I don't hold out a lot of hope for BB's future, a future that they are pinning on the OS not the hardware. An OS that they have had years to finalise, that cannot be simply installed on hardware that they designed and will not upscale to a larger screen or utilise a fixed keyboard at initial launch date.
It also seems to me that BB are wasting far to much effort in getting android apps to run 'under emulation' rather than supplying tools/methodologies that convert android code to native BB10 code.
Course i'm just a consumer and know nothing about it :)
It seems massively short-sighted that Blackberry sees the tablet market as a one-horse-race. Given the proliferation of semi decent cheap tablets just about everywhere, I would have thought it was FAR from a one-horse-race and I doubt Samsung et al are making losses out of it. I can understand Blackberry not wanting to sacrifice the level of hardware quality they offer (and I guess they would have to in order to compete with cheap gadgets with their bigger app ecosystems), but I'm disappointed that they're dropping out of this market.
The CEO said in the press Q & A at the Z10 launch, that they will continue to be in the tablet space. It will be targeted and they would only do something if the margins and business case was right. So the announcement here of them leaving is premature. You will have to wait and see.
Given that Blackberry don't seem to do cheap plastic gadgets, I imagine they'd have to aim high for an iPad-beater: with the edge on quality/performance and greater flexibility at a price that undercuts the iPad sufficiently that buyers will be prepared to take the risk (to counteract a lesser ecosystem). To a degree, concentrating on the phone market (for now) is a good strategy; if they can put Blackberry back on the App-map with good, marketable smartphones, more app developers will see good business sense in developing Blackberry versions in addition. In turn, the more apps available to Blackberry means a future tablet would be a more viable proposition than it is now.
I don't think the article implies that they are leaving the Tablet market. There was a story a couple of days ago when some Blackberry head of something was misquoted and gave the impression that they were on the verge or releasing a new tablet. This is just putting that mis-conception right. That is, there is no new tablet imminent. It doesn't say there will never be one, just now right now.
I'll go out on a limb and despite the Playbook being a superior device, there will never be a second one. Unless BB sells 200 million Z10's.....
I agree with @Bluenoser63 and @ChrisMay that TH and BB are interested in re-entering the tablet space, but only when they find a purpose (niche?) that makes business sense. TH was quite firm in a recent interview in Germany that he does not want to be in the $199 space for tablets. I'm sure that the folks in BB have enough imagination and inventiveness to find that niche. The only problem for those of us not in the "premium" market that bought the PlayBook after the prices were slashed is that the next offering may not be particularly affordable. We'll just have to wait and see.
It's funny because just last week the CEO said in an interview that they are currently working on getting BlackBerry10 onto the PlayBook and Thor instructed his team to build him a tablet...but he's just the CEO, what does he know?