By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla
The BlackBerry PlayBook's future was effectively ended last week with the news that BB10 OS, the current operating system running on the new smartphones, would not make it to the company's two-year old tablet. For owners of these 7-inch devices, this means that they are stuck with the QNX-based BlackBerry OS 2.0 OS, with little hope of seeing BBM (BlackBerry Messenger) or any new features applications moving forward.
“Let me also make some comments on Playbook. Our teams have spent a great deal of time and energy looking at solutions that could move the Blackberry 10 experience to Playbook. But unfortunately, I am not satisfied with the level of performance and user experience, and I made the difficult decision to stop these efforts and focus on our core hardware portfolio. We will, however, support Playbook on the existing software platforms and configurations.”
That was the comment made by Thorsten Heins, BlackBerry's CEO which ended the PlayBook as a product segment for BlackBerry. This marks the shedding of the final vestiges of the previous regime. The PlayBook, after all, was launched during the reign of Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie.
The news last week that BlackBerry is still losing money and that it has lost 4 million users even after debuting new phones is alarming, and only means that the company will need to double down on efforts to promote its existing products, the Z10, Q10 and Q5 handsets to new users.
BlackBerry just can't afford to dwell in the past, which the PlayBook clearly represents. Heins seems ambivalent towards tablets altogether and has been heard saying that there is no future in tablets since smartphones are quickly becoming computing platforms themselves.
As for the PlayBook, let's celebrate it for what it was. An innovative and daring product that helped change the perception of what a tablet device could be. I've owned three PlayBooks and personally loved the form factor, size and build quality of these tablets. The PlayBook's build is something that very few companies have gotten close to duplicating. Even the Kindle Fire, which copies the PlayBook's design, feels less substantial.
Just remember that when you see tablets with front facing speakers, touch-enabled gesture areas on the bezel and full-on real-time multitasking, the PlayBook had these first. Fellow PlayBook users who are lamenting the latest news can take comfort in knowing that they can still sideload some Android apps on the PlayBook, while kind of roundabout and your mileage may vary.
At the very least, the PlayBook remains an excellent email tablet, portable video player and gaming tablet.