The BlackBerry PlayBook was an interesting gamble for Research In Motion (as it was then known). Now that BlackBerry 10 is live, BlackBerry (as it’s now known) isn’t ruling out making new tablets going forward…sort of.
CEO Thorsten Heins said in his keynote that he wants BlackBerry to make a big step forward when it comes to mobile computing, rather than just throwing hardware onto the market.
Heins said that he wants to be able to provide killer apps and an interesting catalogue of services on a tablet before actually putting it out to market:
The way I look at the tablet business is this: providing profit to shareholders on hardware only is difficult. We’ll continue in the tablet space, but we’re looking for specific value services on top of the tablet, and we’re thinking about mobile computing on top of [that].
We want to provide a tablet position that’s not just hardware, we want to provide services on top of that.
The long and short of it? ‘We want a tablet to be able to make money before we put it out there again’.
In the meantime, BlackBerry PlayBook owners should expect to get BlackBerry 10 soon:
We’re working on a Blackberry 10 software for all PlayBooks. We want to upgrade all existing PlayBooks so everyone can have the one platform.