The Blackberry Bold 9700 & Blackberry 9000 Review

is the Blackberry Playbook in danger?

According to BGR (Boy Genius Report) a noted electronics and gadget reporting site, the Blackberry Playbook has been delayed to May due to battery life:

According to Kaufman Brothers analyst Shaw Wu, RIM may be forced to delay the release of its first tablet computer, the BlackBerry PlayBook. Wu claims he is hearing that the PlayBook “needs to improve its relatively poor battery life of a few hours compared to 6 hours for the Samsung Galaxy Tab and 10 hours for [Apple’s] iPad.” As a result, Wu writes, the launch of the BlackBerry PlayBook may be delayed until May, 2011.

If this is true, this indeed doesn’t spell well for the Blackberry Playbook against harsh -already launched- competitors like the Galaxy Tab and the iPad… Not to mention the slew of competitors that are gaming to launch against the Blackberry Playbook such as Viewsonic, Motorola, and others. Sounds like Apple wants to enter the sub-tablet smaller market soon too as they venture into creating a 7″ version.

Who cares about the Playbook?

Well, in the interest of seeing RIM succeed as a company, Mike Lazaridis was correct in saying the Playbook was ahead of the iPad. At least in 3d graphics and processor power based on the dual core snapdragon and QNX operating system (World famously known for it’s small file size, footprint and speed). However, that won’t matter much soon if everyone else gets their foothold and RIM’s left standing with an unsupported device with few applications available for it. Few want to develop custom applications that only work on RIM devices. They would be smart to figure out how to get Blackberry devices running Android software or being compatable both ways to convince developers to build for their platform. That would make their device more appealing to the general market and allow them to stick around longer.

Do I want the Playbook to succeed? Of course, but only from a RIM profitability standpoint. I think tablet PC’s are generally speaking not productivity tools as they’re not so easy to type on, inaccurate touch screens and generally still an entertainment device as even RIM has stated. I’d like to see RIM’s win for the sake of the Blackberry Smartphone, but not so much for the sake of the device itself.