BlackBerry PlayBook sale

Research in Motion promised that it would lower the price of the BlackBerry PlayBook soon in response to sluggish sales. Now it looks like you can pick up a PlayBook in RIM’s home country of Canada for just $299.99.

Best Buy and Future Shop are both offering a 16GB BlackBerry PlayBook tablet for $399.99 — but if you buy a tablet now you also get either $100 off the price of the PlayBook or a $100 gift card that can be used for future purchases. Note that you need to add the tablet to your shopping cart in order to see the new prices.

The price of a 32GB model has also been knocked down to $399.99, while a 64GB model runs $499.99.

The BlackBerry PlayBook features a 7 inch, 1024 x 600 pixel capacitive touchscreen display and a 1 GHz TI OMAP4 dual core processor. It’s the first tablet from RIM, and it runs software based on the QNX operating system. It’s actually a pretty nice little device, but it doesn’t currently run very many third party apps — and right now if you want to use native email, calendar, or contact apps you’ll need to pair the tablet with a BlackBerry smartphone.

RIM plans to release a software update soon that will add native apps for these functions, as well as the ability to run Google Android apps. This could make the tablet a much more useful device — especially for potential tablet customers that don’t already have BlackBerry phones. But as HP recently discovered, nothing drives up demand for a tablet more than a steep price drop. I guess we’ll find out soon whether lowering the price from $500 to $300 is enough of a price cut.

There’s no word on if or when we’ll see similar price adjustments in the US and other countries.

via mobilesyrup

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4 replies on “BlackBerry PlayBook price drops to $300 in Canada”

    1. So you’d rather either get a junk tablet or one with no future?

      Build cost for the Playbook is about ~$273, how are they going to go $99 without a major loss?

      It’ll be basically paying people to buy it then and no business can profit that way.

      No one would ever sell a still good profit for less than it took to make it unless they could make it up with alternate revenue source, which RIM doesn’t have.

      However, we probably won’t see much difference in sales until RIM releases the promised big update in October that fixes many of issues originally complained about for the Playbook.

      In terms of hardware the Playbook is great and just needs to fix some software issues and it’ll be a lot more appealing.

      1. As an “anything-but-Apple” guy I’d like to see this succeed, but the parallels with the TouchPad are unavoidable. The hardware is nice, but not really remarkable. The lack of a software ecosystem is terminal. And if you take the advertising costs RIM must be paying (I was in LAX the other day, every advertising board was continuous Playbook ads), then $299 is still a major loss for them.
        I just don’t see that it has any differentiating features, even with the promised October update. And I get no pleasure at all from that.

        1. Let’s see it’s better at multi-tasking than most tablets and the TI OMAP processor it uses is still better than what most tablets are using for that price range…  It has front facing stereo speaks, iPad still only uses a rear mono speaker for comparison… Bezel can be used for gesture controls in addition to touch screen UI…  They’ll be adding the ability to run some Android apps with the big update to help address that limitation…  Size makes it more portable than the iPad but still usable as a tablet…

          So I wouldn’t say it doesn’t have any differentiating features…

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