“After months of delays, the software upgrade to Research in Motion’s Playbook tablet finally arrived on Tuesday,” Trefis Team writes for Forbes.
“With a native email client, built-in calender and contacts applications, we believe the Blackberry Playbook OS 2.0 addresses many of its predecessor’s limitations, but the lack of BBM functionality will be a deterrent for many of its fans,” Trefis writes. “With cheaper and much more popular 7-inch tablets such as Amazon’s Kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble’s Nook tablet gaining market share in the low-end tablet market and Apple’s iPad dominating the high-end space, RIM will have to do much more to stay relevant in the tablet arena.”
Trefis writes, “Enterprise customers constitute a huge proportion of its overall customer base that use its Blackberry phones to connect to its enterprise server and send secure encrypted messages. The Blackberry Messaging service accounts for close to 30% of our $16.50 price estimate for RIM stock and brings in a lot of value to the company’s business. However, just like its predecessor, the new upgrade lacks BBM functionality as well as integration with the company’s enterprise server software. This, we believe, is a huge gaping hole in the company’s Playbook software that needs to be addressed as soon as possible.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: As anyone who’s ever tried to use DCW’s playbook can attest, it’s a wholly unintuitive piece of overpriced crap. Amateur hour, indeed.
Related articles:
Beleaguered RIM slashes prices on all PlayBook duds to $299 – January 3, 2012
Beleaguered RIM’s earnings fall 71% amid weak sales – December 16, 2011
Beleaguered RIM weighed down by tablet ‘albatross’ in Apple iPad-ruled world – December 6, 2011
Beleaguered RIM’s PlayBook mistake forebodes doom for BlackBerry-maker – December 3, 2011
Beleaguered RIM misses its revenue forecast; takes $360 million bath to clear unsold PlayBooks; shares plummet – December 2, 2011
I still can’t believe they don’t support BBM on it. That would be like Microsoft releasing Word that couldn’t import excel files at all.
This will be the last update to play book. It’s dead.
EXACTLY. WTF goes on at RIM? The DUH Factor here is off the scale.
iPad killer.
The Proview iPAD, that is.
RIM really is toast. They may as well throw in the towel. Nokia at least has a fighting chance with WP7 but RIM has nothing, nada…
RiM has QNX. They are not giving up. (Now that they are fully awakened from their long nap in Waterloo.) But popcorn time will continue for a while.
BlackBerry PlayBook OS? The first version was pathetic. This version is embarrassing. The next version might move up another rank to yawn-inducing.
And they had better drop the “amateur hour” advertising campaign in favor of, let’s see, “and now for something completely different!”
I do know about QNX and I’m sure it’s technically robust and all but it’ll just be *way* too late no matter how good it is. The market has left RIM hopelessly behind. RIM has to build an ecosystem to have a chance at survival and I just don’t see how they make a marketing dent against the iOS, Android and WP7/8. It’s now a matter of “when” RIM will disappear, not “if.”
QNX has been around for decades and was a well respected real-time OS long before RIM got their hands on it. So it’s not QNX’s fault if the Playbook fails.
Nice ‘Python’ reference, Jane.
QNX could be the greatest operating system ever created. It’s not. But even assuming it is, it is too late to matter. Having a great OS without a similarly robust ecosystem and developer tools and developer support is meaningless.
The game has moved on from OS and UI to developers, software, ecosystem and cloud service integration.
RIM had a head start with BBM, apple with iMessage erased that lead and has left RIM far behind on every metric.
It’s just too little, too late, RIM is DCW.
As long as they use the Liberty Bell March as their background music.
Please don’t forget the fart sound at the end…
un plus!
… more like the Loony Tunes: That s all Folks!…
There’s about 600 comments all praising PlayBook 2.0 on the Globe and Mail… I guess that’s the number of PlayBook users.
No, it’s a Canadian thing. Cheering on the home team and all that.
Yeah but BOOING and throwing fish on the ice when a lame home team has a losing streak is ALSO a Canadian thing. Cheering on RIM at this point is like enabling a drug addict. Stop and get them some help before they KILL themselves!
The 7″ form-factor is a no-go for business applications. Maybe it’s got some potential as a book reader, I’m sure it does for personal use but can you imagine any executive scaling down or scrolling 8 x 11 inch documents – for every document that comes across there desk? Not going to happen, or not for very long for those foolish enough to try.
Five years from now, when RIMM ends up trading at $3 and RIM (the company) completes its seventh round of layoffs, with the BlackBerry market share percentage in the low single digits, Lazaridis and Balsillie will be able to say that it wasn’t their fault; after all, when they left, the company was still growing, very profitable and with a solid market share…
Five years from now? I personally expect RIM to be sold off by the end of this year. If not, I expect them to be dropped off the stock exchange as moribund in 2013.
Lazaridis and Balsillie will be able to say…
Too late for that. History has been already written otherwise. Everyone knows why they dropped out.
“With a native email client, built-in calender and contacts applications…” Forbes magazine cannot spell calendar?
+1 Good catch.
I’m just wondering who the heck this Trefis Team guy is, anyway? Where do these people go to get those catchy names anyway?
Wow, it can do email now.
No wonder 90% of all crackheads and looters choose RIMM.
BLOODBATH!
“Enterprise customers constitute a huge proportion of its overall customer base”
In fact, is “Ignorant” the bigger customer base for RIM 😉
With cheaper and much more popular 7-inch tablets
Um, what?
such as Amazon’s Kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble’s Nook tablet gaining market share
Um, WHAT?!?!?
in the low-end tablet market
Ahhh, so they’re only looking at the non-iPad tablet market there.
Yes please. Let’s get real here:
Your company sells a 7″ OtherPad BELOW COST and what a shock, people like that. But darn oh darn, NO PROFIT.
It is utter ABSURDITY when TechTard journalists go all shaky in the knees over the sale of eBook readers. These gadgets are made cheap. Their capabilities are correspondingly limited. They’re sold at fire sale prices, making their companies either next-to-no money, OR as is the case with Amazon, they LOSE THE COMPANY MONEY.
Then these TechTards neglect to mention whether these cheap-in-every-way gadgets actually lead to any book or media sales, which is what these budget OtherPads are actually for. Capitalism? What’s that? Cost versus profit? Who cares?
Then of course the TechTards toss in an inference that just maybe these devices have any relevance to the 10″ Apple iPad market. Or, oh just maybe they’ll help spur the Windows 8 OtherPad market, whenever that’s going to happen. 😯 Right.
TechTardiness is rampant. I can only laugh. 😆
Rim’s security paradigm centers on ” one user ID on one device”. They have had over a year since the release of the first playbook to change it and have been unable to modernize their software. When first released you had to tether through from the one device to see email on the playbook. All that they have done now is provide email on the playbook
Apple on the other hand, “one user ID on multiple devices”.
That’s right, and that’s the reason for the delay. After the black eyes they got last year following multiple security breaches, they are making damn sure that these new devices are ironclad. Clearly they don’t have that working yet…
This is a balancing act for them. They have to get something out there, but they can’t chance another security snafu. Thus, 2.0 is released but with the gaping hole.
Wow! Expect no love from MDN Research In Motion!