BlackBerry PlayBook

» see us.blackberry.com/playbook-tablet as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

the playbook is the tablet i can describe entirely from tech-press coverage. nobody around me in turkey ever owned one. by the time the fire-sale numbers were going around in late 2011, rim was already two product cycles into a slow decline that the blackberry-bold loyalists were not ready to admit yet. the playbook was rim's attempt to ship a tablet by itself, separately from a phone, in the year apple had just put out the ipad 2. it did not go well.

rim announced the device at devcon in september 2010 and shipped it on april 19 2011 in the us and canada. the launch price was $499 for the 16gb wifi model, the same as the ipad 2 at the same capacity. the hardware was a 7-inch tablet running blackberry tablet os, which was a port of qnx neutrino with adobe air for the application layer. the screen was good and the build quality was acceptable. the rest of the product was a mess.

the launch flaw that everyone wrote about was the missing email client. the playbook did not have a native mail app at launch. if you wanted email on the tablet you had to pair it with a blackberry phone over bluetooth, which routed mail through the phone. for a company whose entire brand was built on push email, this was a configuration so strange it became the lead in every review. a software update added native mail in february 2012. by then the reputational damage was done and the units were stacked in retail backrooms.

~ the case file ~

~ how it landed ~

rim shipped about 500,000 playbooks in the first quarter and 200,000 in the second. the company had projected millions. by november 2011 retailers were sitting on inventory that was not moving, and rim took a $485 million writedown to account for the gap between what they had been hoping for and what they had actually sold. fire-sale pricing dropped the 16gb model to $199 in the us holiday window, which moved more units but also confirmed the market price the device had probably deserved from the start.

~ the slide ~

the app ecosystem never caught up. blackberry tablet os was its own platform with its own development tools, and the major iphone-and-android app vendors were not interested in building a third version of their software for a tablet with two million units in circulation. os 2.0 in february 2012 added the ability to run android apps in a compatibility layer. that helped a little but reviewers still treated playbook apps as a port-of-a-port problem. the app store felt empty for the device's entire shipping life.

~ what really happened ~

thorsten heins became rim's ceo in january 2012 and immediately had to figure out what to do with the playbook. the answer turned out to be very little. development continued at a reduced pace through 2012 with a 4g lte version that almost nobody bought. heins announced in june 2013 that the playbook would not get blackberry 10, the new os that the phone line was migrating to, which was the public end of the product. retail continued to sell off remaining inventory through 2014. blackberry kept pushing security patches to the tablet os until april 2019, when the certificate updates stopped and the playbook officially became an unsupported device.

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