Are you one of the few million people around the world to buy the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet? Were you hoping that BlackBerry would bring its latest operating system to the tablet? You might want to just give up hope now.
BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins has confirmed that BlackBerry 10 won’t be coming to the PlayBook. Now, you might not want to throw out your PlayBook in a fit of rage just yet though. Heins says that his company will continue to “support PlayBook on existing software platform and configurations.” In other words, you can look forward to a future of exciting security updates.
So, why can’t BlackBerry brings its latest OS to the PlayBook? Heins says it’s all about system performance. He wasn’t satisfied “with [the] level of performance and user experience.” That almost sounds like the PlayBook is just too old to support all the brand spanking new features found in BlackBerry 10, like video chat and screen share.
Of course, there could be another reason – sales figures. In yesterday’s quarterly report, BlackBerry only shipped 100,000 PlayBooks. In the same quarter, it shipped 2.72 million BlackBerry 10 smartphones. Why support an aging and apparently unpopular device when you can be supporting the few million smartphones that are your ticket out of irrelevancy? BlackBerry has limited resources and it must focus on what makes money. It may seem sad to you, but the PlayBook doesn’t make enough money to justify the R&D required to make BB10 work flawlessly on the device.
After all this, there’s still hope that the BlackBerry faithful will get a BB10 powered tablet, right? I wouldn’t hold my breath. In a previous interview, Heins said that tablets were a dead end business model. He thinks that tablets will cease to be relevant in only five years. Instead, he feels that a “big screen in your workplace” will replace it. He never said what that “big screen” was, but I highly doubt BlackBerry will be getting into the quickly disintegrating desktop market.
[h/t: TechCrunch]