BlackBerry PlayBook

Research in Motion has releases its latest quarterly earnings report, and while the company shipped more than 14 million smartphones, RIM only moved about 150,000 BlackBerry PlayBook tablets in the quarter ending November 26th, 2011.

The company shipped about 200,000 tablets the previous quarter, and half a million the quarter before that, which means that since the tablet launched earlier this year RIM moved about 850,000 BlackBerry PlayBooks.

While sales seem to have slowed down in recent months, RIM has been taking aggressive measures to pick up the pace. The 7 inch tablet has a list price of $499.99 and up, but in November RIM offered promotional pricing as low as $199.99. Prices were even lower if you were in the market for a refurbished model or happened to be a RIM employee.

Prices have gone back up a bit in recent weeks, but it looks like RIM plans to sell $200 tablets again after Christmas. I suspect tablet sales may have picked up a little steam during these promotions, but since the company’s fiscal quarter ended in late November, any boost in sales won’t be apparent until the next quarterly earnings report.

The BlackBerry PlayBook features a 7 inch, 1024 x 600 pixel display, a 1 GHz TI OMAP4 dual core processor, 1GB of RAM, and 16GB through 64GB of storage. It features the BlackBerry Tablet OS operating system, and if you upgrade to PlayBook OS 2.0 you can also run some Android apps on the device, which helps overcome one of the tablet’s biggest challenges: There still aren’t very many good native apps for the PlayBook.

If you’re willing to void your warranty you can also root the PlayBook and install the Android Market.

Update: There’s a little bit of good news tucked into today’s announcement. While RIM only shipped 150,000 tablets during the quarter, the customers actually bought more than that. In other words, some of the tablets that had been shipped previously and which were just hanging out on store shelves sold out and RIM shipped an extra supply of tablets to help keep stores stocked.

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5 replies on “RIM shipped about 850,000 BlackBerry PlayBook tablets this year”

  1. Remember that RIM took more than a $400 million charge due to the Playbook. I’d guess that was writing down the value of their shipments by 1/2 or more, resulting in offering the Playbooks for $200.

  2. I really like the PlayBook–hardware and software–however, RIM really has botched the entire launch–devs are just now getting the tools they need for the platform, and marketing & pricing of the tablet were very bad.

    I do hope they get things together because BB10 can be a great platform.

  3. Hopefully the Android player works really well as we’ve been missing a lot of standard apps on the PlayBook.

  4. a refurbished model?  they are brand new.  wtf are you talking about?  there are no refurbished model

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