Research in Motion is making its quarterly earning report today, and while it’s hardly all good news, RIM has managed to convince at least a million people to use its 7 inch BlackBerry PlayBook tablet.
The PlayBook launched in February, 2011. At the time the tablet featured attractive hardware but an unattractive price and a tough-sell operating system.
For $499 or more, you could buy a tablet that didn’t run very many third party apps and didn’t even have its own PIM (personal information management) apps for email, calendar, or contact management.
But over the past year RIM has made a number of changes. You can now pick up a PlayBook for as little as $199, and BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0 adds native PIM functionality as well as support for some Android apps.
Those changes might not be enough to make the PlayBook into an iPad killer, but during today’s earnings call, RIM CEO Thorsten Heins said that there are “over one million PlayBook customers.”
It’s not clear that the company’s making much money from sales of $199 tablets. But at least it’s giving people reasons to use its products and services.
love mine.
I got mine last month, I LOVE IT!!! can’t believe how misleading the media around these puppies is… plus $200 is a steal… getting one for my wife next week…
having fun 🙂
 got mine last week for 170 at buy .com.my perfect price point.having funny playing with it.
A lot of folks got it for free including myself for porting Android apps to BB OS. 🙂 Freeeeee …. Well, that explains how they jacked up the number.
 It has been on the rise ever since they started lowering the pricing and finally released the OS 2.0 update. While there aren’t anywhere near a million people who took advantage of the free offer for promoting development. So most of those numbers represent actual sales.
They still need to do a lot better though if they want to stay in business…