Has RIM Missed the Tablet Market?
I think by now, everyone understands how quickly the technology market moves. In the time it takes for someone to decide on a mobile device or tablet and then go ahead and purchase the product, the markets will have moved on. I will use a quick example here, I know someone who has recently purchased a HTC Sensation XE. This is an excellent phone and offers some decent specs including its 1.5 GHz dual-core processor however there has been confirmation that HTC will soon be showing off a range of new devices at the Mobile World Conference in Barcelona. The one that comes to mind for me is the upcoming HTC Zeta which has a beautiful design and some breathtaking specs. It will be running Android 4.0 Ice-cream sandwich and will be one of the first devices to come pre-installed with it. I think more breathtaking than that is the fact that it will be sporting a 2.5 GHz Quad-Core processor offering a real powerful punch, but I think I am getting off topic.
I want to look closely at the Blackberry Playbook which was first launched by Research in Motion last April but immediately had problems. The playbook launched with its own operating system called Blackberry tablet OS based upon the QNX Neutrino kernel. The problem here was that the system was very slugglish and at times I found it to be completely unresponsive or attempting to the complete opposite of what you were trying to achieve. There were concerns about the operating system from day one though, there were many comments made that the operating system crashed completely and criticism soon emerged suggesting that RIM had launched the device too early without testing it.
The other major criticism for the launch of the playbook came after users found that it came with no email client or calendar. This was very surprising for a company that works around productivity and business and the battery life saw in come in at second from bottom compared to other tablet devices around that time. The final nail in the coffin for RIM at launch was the price was over priced for an unfinished tablet that did not appear to be anywhere in the same league as its rivals such as the Motorola Xoom or the iPad 2.
We move a few months down the line to yesterday when the announcement came that Research in Motion would be releasing a software update for the playbook called 2.0. This would certainly fix most of the problems that the playbook started with and added features that should have been available at launch. This includes a native email client and a calendar application. It now also sees an update for documents to go and print to go and allows IT managers bring in Blackberry fusion.
There also comes an update for Blackberry Bridge allowing users of the playbook to make it communicate with blackberry phones and allows them to become remotes for the tablet device. The question that must be asked now though is this too late to allow RIM to continue making decent sales figures from the playbook? I think that Blackberry Tablet OS 2.0 is aimed primarily at users who already own the playbook rather than trying to get new users because lets be honest, the playbook has pretty much lost the attention of consumers now. The market is pretty much commanded these days between Honeycomb and iOS with many companies producing android tablets and Apple continuing their march against rivals.
It is an excellent decision for RIM to finally add these features to allow those who forked out the money for the device to get some use out of it yet I think its a lost cause in getting new users interested. If RIM are looking to gain the attention of consumers once more I think the correct thing to do is start from the bottom up and scrap the playbook completely.
Marc Evans May 1, 2012 at 10:01 AM in Technology, touchscreen tagged RIM, Xoom, ipad, playbook 