RIM delays PlayBook OS 2.0 until February 2012

[Jos]

It's bad enough that RIM's PlayBook was released on the market without key BlackBerry features like BBM or email, but now the company is saying that the software upgrade that's supposed to enable this functionality has been delayed until February.

RIM's senior vice president for the PlayBook, David Smith, said they've made the difficult decision to hold off launching BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0 until they're confident it fully meets the expectations of developers, enterprise customers and end-users. The company’s approach is understandable given their recent troubles and all the bad press it got, the problem is by then it will have taken them 10 months to get things sorted out.

The PlayBook is just not a viable competitor right now and RIM will have a hard time changing that by the time the new OS lands.

Native support for e-mail, contacts and push messaging was supposed to arrive in an update soon after the device launched. Instead, RIM offered a workaround that allowed users to access such features by connecting their PlayBook tablet to a BlackBerry handset via a BlueTooth link program called BlackBerry Bridge.

The company did demo a developer beta of PlayBook OS 2.0 at BlackBerry DevCon, where it also announced its unified, next-gen mobile platform named BBX that's said to combine the best of BlackBerry OS and QNX.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/46026-rim-delays-playbook-os-20-until-february-2012.html

 

[DokkRokken]

If I had paid a much higher price, and held higher expectations of my PB, I'd be very upset.

But what on Earth is going on with RIM? Have Waterloo's Tim Hortons' been sneaking mushrooms into the donuts? Is the coffee laced with LSD? Taking nearly a year to get a native email and calender update out is retarded. Doubly so if it was promised to debut just after the launch. People paid good money for the PB with the expectation that RIM would fulfill its promise; I can't blame many BB users for being very upset.

Currently updated, the PB is an incredibly snappy little device. But RIM is killing it. Who'll want to develop for a device that won't face a major update for another four months? Maybe the PB was an experiment for the company, but whatever the case, they're losing a lot of credibility from both the enterprise and casual users. Companies don't like it when deadlines aren't met. You can bet RIM is going to be 'fired' by quite a few clients in the coming months.

 

[lawfer]

And what kills me is that Blackberry is supposed to be "superior" in the email category. I would call this irony at its best, but right now it's just sad.

 

[spydercanopus]

Elite corporations are prepping for 2012 cataclysm instead of producing revenue generation products. They're in full spending mode prepping for 20 years for living underground.

 

[jonny702]

I would hate to be a RIM shraeholder right now