More blood on Apple iPad’s touchscreen: BlackBerry’s Playbook is dead

“Research In Motion Ltd.’s [sic.] foray into the tablet market looks like it’s ending,” David George-Cosh reports for The Wall Street Journal. “RIM’s PlayBook, an attempt at securing a foothold in the popular tablet category largely dominated by Apple Inc.’s iPad, won’t be upgraded to support its BlackBerry 10 operating system, the company’s CEO Thorsten Heins said during a conference call Friday morning.”

“That could effectively end the company’s brief and unprofitable entry into the tablet market,” George-Cosh reports. “BlackBerry moved about 100,000 PlayBook devices in its most recent quarter. That should dwindle as the company clears out its remaining inventory. RIM said it will still support the current PlayBook with the old OS, but it’s unlikely to attract much more interest if it’s not transitioning the device to the software it’s betting its future on.”

Read more in the full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: DCW.

AMATEUR HOUR IS OVER. The BlackBerry® PlayBook™ is dead.

So ends one of the most ill-conceived and ironic slogans in marketing history.

Oh, by the way, speaking of companies talking out of their collective ass:

“The device will probably capture 10 percent of the tablet market by 2015, compared with 47 percent for the iPad, research firm Gartner Inc. predicts. PlayBook sales will be about 29 million devices in 2015, eclipsed by a forecast of about 138 million iPad sales, according to Gartner.” – Bloomberg News, April 15, 2011

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30 Comments

    1. There is nothing wrong with Bloomberg News’ coverage in this instance. They are merely reporting what Gartner predicted. Direct your ire at the proper party, Gartner, not the messenger.

        1. The messenger IS the culprit. Gardner are just paid shills and doing their jobs. Bloomberg are reporting the words of paid shills as if they are facts giving them undue credibility. So 98% of the blame belongs to the media outlet in this case. By the way we don’t shoot messengers, we just throw them into wells.

  1. And the stock is tanking 25%!!! I’m shocked, shocked!!! How can this be? BBRY was to have been the greatest turnaround story since that snooty Apple company got lucky. All of the analysts said BBRY was going to make it. They said it would take market share from Apple. They – were wrong >8-p

    1. If a rival company sells even a few devices it will be declared as seriously taking away market share from Apple. It’s like Apple is the only company in the entire world that can suffer from a loss of market share from competition. Why people put so much importance on gaining and losing market share, I find it’s rather unbelievable. I think most companies exist within their own merits and shouldn’t always be measured in comparison to other companies. I’m sure BBRY can survive on its own without having to be top dog in the smartphone industry.

      I’ll admit I was surprised to see BlackBerry shares tanking, but then again, the hedge funds are usually always to blame for dumping shares of a company to that degree. It’s like they all work in swarms to sink companies’ value.

  2. Remember when President Obama wanted to order a boatload of these things for his staff? Sheesh.

    If the Playbook had been done right, it might have had a life. But it was not. It never had a chance. That’s entirely Blackberry’s fault. Kind of sad. I would have preferred them as competitors with Apple versus the snotty little Android and Surface baby brats with which Apple currently contends in the ‘slab’ market.

  3. Competitors really didn’t see what Apple created with the iPhone and still didn’t get it with the iPad.

    Apple created a “Universal Computing-Communicating Pad”.

    The future is now in software programming and accessory systems. There is no reason I see to develop for multiple hardware and specifically for insecure and malware ridden hardware & OSs of lower quality.

    The people who jumped on iOS programming clear back in 2007 are the leaders today.

  4. Microsoft is going to have to give away their tablets to ‘claim’ marketshare and Google will have to develop Chrome now that they have lost Android to Samsung. Hopefully Apple will come out with a Retina iPad Mini to really cement in the iPad line.

  5. The Playbook was dead on arrival. Only RIM believed it had a chance. I knew something was going from bad to worse when they started talking about running Android apps on the PlayBook.

  6. This is what happens when you try to actually invent something as opposed to Google and Samsung. Those two idiots just slavishly copied Apple. Watch every other company that tries to build these products without copying Google and Samsungs methods will fail or have marginal success.

    1. Actually, I think Google reviews a lot of novel concepts and approves a fair number of them. Of course, most won’t make it to the street, but that’s part of what R&D costs. It’s funny, though. When they do put spiffy new hardware into reviewers’ hands, there is a bit of cognitive disconnect, as if the products had been designed by an alien species for what they guessed humans would appreciate.

      The genius of Samsung, on the other hand, is to see what humans actually buy, then manufacture those things.

  7. What kind of a creep are you saying there is “More blood on Apple iPad’s touchscreen: BlackBerry’s Playbook is dead”. Why do you blame Apple and why are you so macabre in your comment? Are you mentally ill?

  8. Will mr.market think blackberry can’t do well , neither will Apple ?

    U know , Mr market loves to bullshit on Apple , what Mr.market says about Apple is something only stupid will trust .

  9. the sad thing about it is that those silly analyst predictions are the stuff that helped aapl fall from 700. I also remember some of them saying Windows Phone would eclipse iPhone by 2015.

  10. Next to fall is Amazon’s Kindle. Give it six months.
    Would have said Google’s Nexus tablet, but not a single person I know owns one. Good as dead already.

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