Research in Motion (RIM)’s answer to the Apple iPad, the Blackberry Playbook might not have been as successful as investors, the manufacturer and even users thought it might be. With slightly less than half a million sales in the previous quarter, the results were not quite up to the mark and it seemed as though the manufacturer had quite high expectations. It wasn’t very surprising as the Playbook had to compete with the iPad from a reputed manufacturer with a huge application reservoir and the Android tablets which were open to be modified by any programmer across the world.
The slow first quarter of sales of the Playbook led to a decrease in the projection for the number of Playbooks that will be sold by the end of the year. It was initially a modest 2.2 million but after the quarter results, experts place the number at only around 1.5 million. This is in competition to the 39.2 million iPads that were sold over the past year. Even the Samsung tablets managed an impressive 7 million figure in the sales department.
With the figures not as good as hoped for, a lot of speculation has sprung up. One of the main reasons for the disappointing number of Playbooks is the lack of supporting applications or even a reasonable application market at that. In addition, the majority of the Playbook users are Blackberry users but those who were subject to the issues might have shifted to other tablets.
So what could the future of the Playbook be? For one, it is quite possible that RIM might lower the prices. It is not that it should be reduced to $150 or something but paying $500 for a Playbook seems quite ridiculous. RIM should take some advice from HP and slash prices if it hopes to see the Playbook in the hands of any tablet user in the future.
