RIM devalues Playbook Inventory by $485 Million

Research In Motion said that it will record a $485 million charge on the inventory valuation of the company's BlackBerry PlayBook tablets when it reports results for its third business quarter later this month. "A number of factors have led to the need for an inventory provision in the third quarter," said RIM co-CEO Mike Lazaridis.

However, RIM has no intention of emulating HP, which quickly sold off its remaining TouchPad tablet inventory and abandoned the market last August. The BlackBerry maker's goal is to dramatically increase the number of PlayBooks in the hands of more customers by cutting prices.

The PlayBook inventory write-down is merely the first page in RIM's new playbook for more effectively competing with lower-priced tablet models such as Amazon's $199 Kindle Fire and the new $249 Nook Tablet from Barnes & Noble. RIM is also aware that delays in the release of the new PlayBook OS 2.0 software featuring more advanced capabilities has hindered the BlackBerry tablet's immediate sales prospects at the old price.

Lazaridis said RIM remained committed to the PlayBook platform and believed the tablet market was still in its infancy.

"We believe the PlayBook, which will be further enhanced with the upcoming PlayBook OS 2.0 software, is a compelling tablet for consumers that also offers unique security and manageability features for the enterprise," Lazaridis said.

By reducing the PlayBook's retail price, RIM hopes to drive the development of a vibrant application ecosystem in advance of the launch of its upgraded BlackBerry smartphones. However, the PlayBook's sales prospects - even at sharply reduced prices - are limited because of the relatively few applications and multimedia entertainment options available for the current PlayBook platform.

Even with the special promotions, RIM said that it only sold 150,000 PlayBook units to retailers and distributors during the business quarter which ended on Nov. 26. On the other hand, RIM said its own internal numbers indicate that the actual sell-through to consumers was even higher as distributors presumably moved to clear their store shelves.

Still, it remains unclear whether RIM's new PlayBook strategy will put into play enough units to encourage software developers to create more apps for the company's PlayBook OS 2.0 platform, which is expected to launch in February.

RIM downgraded as $200 PlayBook vanishes

Last week, Research in Motion cut the price on its low-end PlayBook tablet to just $200 for a limited time in an effort to woo Thanksgiving holiday shoppers to the device just as competitors like the Barnes & Noble Nook tablet and Kindle Fire went on sale. However, just as quickly as the $200 PlayBook appeared, it seems to be vanishing: retailers appear to be in the process of removing the $200 PlayBook devices from their online catalogs, and some Best Buy customers have reported their orders for the $200 tablets have been cancelled.

Complaints in Best Buy customer forums were first reported by Electronista. Quick checks of other retailers that had previously been offering the $200 tablets (Staples, Office Depot, Walmart, and RadioShack) finds the only $200 tablets listed as available are refurbished models.

The move could indicate that RIM’s idea of “a limited time only” was indeed just a period of a few days surrounding the Thanksgiving holiday, or that the $200 promotional price proved popular with consumers, even as the Kindle Fire hit the streets. Sterne Agee analyst Shaw Wu notes the company is facing serious competition from the likes of Samsung, Apple, Amazon, and HTC, and that significant service outages in October have damaged RIM with its bread-and-butter enterprise and government customers.

RIM committed to PlayBook

BlackBerry maker Research In Motion (RIM) dismissed a report that it was pulling the plug on its PlayBook tablet computer.

Major US retailers, meanwhile, slashed the price of the PlayBook by up to $200. The move comes a day after Amazon unveiled a tablet rival with a $199 price tag.

RIM stressed its commitment to the PlayBook after Collins Stewart analyst John Vihn said the Canadian company has stopped production of the device.

"Any suggestion that the BlackBerry PlayBook is being discontinued is pure fiction," RIM said. "RIM remains highly committed to the tablet market."

Sales of the PlayBook have been sluggish since the device went on sale in mid-April with a $499 price tag for the 16-gigabyte model, $599 for the 32GB version and $699 for the 64GB model.

Best Buy, Staples and Office Max were offering the PlayBook for $299, $399 and $499 on Thursday. Office Depot was selling the device for $100 off.

The PlayBook was still being offered for its original price at RIM's online store and through US carrier Sprint.

Amazon unveiled a tablet computer, the Kindle Fire, on Wednesday which costs $199, less than half the price of the market-leading iPad from Apple.

The cheapest iPad costs $499.

BlackBerry PlayBook price slashed by $150 at Best Buy

Last month Best Buy appeared to be complaining that its stockrooms were full of unsold Hewlett-Packard TouchPads. A few days later HP announced it was ending tablet and smartphone production. The price of the TouchPad was then slashed to virtually nothing, resulting in the devices flying off the shelves in a matter of hours.

Could it be that all the space taken up the TouchPads has now been filled with similarly slow-selling BlackBerry PlayBooks? The reason fir this suggestion is because Best Buy knocked $150 off the cost of the 64GB version in a sale, bringing it down to $550 from a hefty $700.

The 16GB and 32GB versions have been discounted too, by $50, giving them price tags of $450 and $550 respectively. The 32GB PlayBook is now at the same price as the 64GB device – $550. It’s hard to believe there’s anyone out there who won't prefer the 64GB version.”

Research In Motion’s PlayBook has had something of a rough ride since its launch in April this year. Reviews have been mixed, while just a month after appearing on shelves, almost 1,000 of the tablets had to be recalled due to unspecified faulty hardware issues.

The Canadian company has also been having a hard time persuading networks to carry the device. Just last month Sprint announced that it was scrapping plans to bring the 4G PlayBook to its network. It is currently with no major US carriers.

RIM will be hoping the sale price will shift a few more of the devices. And Best Buy will certainly be happy to have some more stockroom space available.

RIM brings Angry Birds to PlayBook

The widely popular mobile game Angry Birds will be available soon on Research In Motion's PlayBook tablet, the company said.

The game, which features birds destroying the pigs which stole their eggs with the help of a slingshot, is developed by Rovio, which plans to list on the Nasdaq within five years.

RIM PlayBook hits market with an app deficit

Research In Motion’s PlayBook is starting off with a definite apps deficit as it hits the market Tuesday. It will only have 3,000 apps vs. the hundreds of thousands available for the iPad from Apple. Omar El Akkad reports in The Globe and Mail: “Apple’s iPad can make use of the hundreds of thousands of apps built for the smaller iPhone. But PlayBook owners won’t be able to use even the much smaller number of BlackBerry apps until RIM has a fix ready this summer.” He said RIM will enable PlayBook users to run apps designed for competing tablets from Google’s Android operating system this summer. “The move means an infusion of tens of thousands of apps for the PlayBook,” he said. Farhad Manjoo points out other issues in Slate: “Reviewers who have gotten early access to the PlayBook have been almost universally puzzled by how half-baked it is. In its current form, the PlayBook doesn't include any apps to access your email, calendar and address book. To get those things, you've got to have a BlackBerry phone, too.” He describes this approach as nothing less than insane and a sign of a company “circling the drain.” He said RIM’s co-CEOs have been “comically incoherent about their plans for the future” as its share of the smartphone market has been gobbled. RIM, based in Waterloo, Canada, seems to have taken on a bunker mentality. They’re not feeling the love. Mike Lazaridis, “the brain behind the BlackBerry,” is taking a leaf from the boys over at South Park who sang in the film South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut: “Blame Canada.” El Akkad said: “Lazaridis is proud of his role in turning this – RIM, the city of Waterloo, the university, the institutes – into a hotbed of innovation. But he is bothered, too, because he believes people don’t understand how much all of this is really worth. “Maybe we’re just not good at promoting ourselves. Maybe that’s the Canadian way.” He said that he and fellow CEO, Jim Balsillie, perhaps should have moved the company to Silicon Valley instead of remaining “loyal patriots” to the Great White North. PlayBook will show whether RIM has a second act in its playbook following its success with BlackBerry in the corporate and government markets, and whether it can penetrate a consumer market created by and dominated by Apple. El Akkad said, “It’s an audacious strategy. If it succeeds, RIM just might regain the ground it has lost in the smartphone market, while finding new sources of revenue. But if the strategy fails, then arguably so does RIM. At the very least, it would relegate it to No. 3 status for a long time to come, a poor cousin to Apple and Google – two companies that five years ago were not even in RIM’s business of wireless communications.”

RIM PlayBook gets 7digital music store

Blackberry-maker Research In Motion will release its long-awaited PlayBook tablet computer with Britain's 7digital music store.

The music store of 7digital, half-owned by HMV, which has some 13 million tracks, will be pre-installed on the tablet at its launch in the United States and Canada, with further international roll out in 2011.

The PlayBook, set for launch in March, was first announced in September last year, and will now join a booming market dominated by Apple's iPad and compete for attention with tablets from the likes of Samsung, Motorola Mobility and Hewlett-Packard.

RIM unveils the BlackBerry PlayBook

BlackBerry maker Research in Motion is taking on iPad in the table computer game with a "PlayBook" aimed to capitalize on its strength.

RIM is calling its 7-inch, camera-packing tablet the BlackBerry PlayBook. CEO, Mike Lazaridis showed off the long-rumored device during the keynote of RIM’s BlackBerry developer conference in San Francisco.

RIM says its new tablet will arrive in the U.S. in early 2011, and in overseas markets in the second quarter of next year.

Expectations are a 0.9-pound tablet that’s 9.7 mm (or 0.4 inch) thick, complete with a pair of cameras: a 5-megapixel camera in the back, and a 3MP lens in front, both capable of recording HD video.

The 7 inch display - the same size as that on the just-announced Samsung Galaxy Tab - will boast a resolution of 1024 by 600, and it’s a capacitive multitouch display, good for such multi-finger gestures as punching and zooming.

The "no-compromises" PlayBook will run on a new tablet OS designed by QNX Software Systems which RIM acquired back in April, and it’ll be powered by a 1GHz dual-core processor, complete with a whopping 1GB of onboard RAM. The PlayBook will also support multitasking and Flash as well as multimedia-friendly HTML5 Web standards.

The PlayBook will arrive with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth support, with both 3G and 4G versions coming "in the future”. The PlayBook will also connect to a nearby BlackBerry via Bluetooth for viewing e-mail, calendar, to-do items or contacts - meaning that you’ll be able to tap out messages on the PlayBook and fire them off from your handheld BlackBerry.

We can also expect "nonproprietary" microUSB and micro-HDMI ports, with the PlayBook capable of outputting full-on 1080p video via HDMI, RIM says.

A slick promo video for the PlayBook shows features such as tabbed browsing, an app task bar, threaded messaging, on-the-Web YouTube video, and tablet-sized e-mail and event interfaces - all very iPad-like, with the added twist of the PlayBook acting as a BlackBerry companion in addition to a stand-alone slate.

But we’ll have to wait for more details on the BlackBerry PlayBook until the tablet’s launch date which is un-announced yet.