Research in Motion has announced they will continue to support Flash player on their BlackBerry PlayBook tablet despite the fact that Adobe revealed yesterday they were no longer planning to develop future versions of the software.
In a statement to AllThingsD, RIM says it had licensed Adobe's source code and plans to continue to update aspects of the software to run on their tablet.
As an Adobe source code licensee, we will continue to work on and release our own implementations. RIM remains committed to delivering an uncompromised Web browsing experience to our customers, including native support for Adobe Flash Player on our BlackBerry PlayBook tablet (similar to a desktop PC browser), as well as HTML5 support on both our BlackBerry smartphone and PlayBook browser. In fact, we are pleased that Adobe will focus more efforts on the opportunities that HTML5 presents for our developers, and shares our commitment to HTML5 as we discussed together at DevCon Americas.
As the report points out, RIM may soon realize that taking on such a challenge could be more work than they bargained for. Of course, when your operating system is heavily based on Flash like QNX is, you're options are limited.
As the saying goes, "when it rains, it pours," and that couldn't be more truthful for the struggling BlackBerry maker. Trouble started earlier this year with subpar earnings results which snowballed into job cuts worldwide. Poor PlayBook sales led to excess inventory which prompted RIM to slash prices twice in an effort to get tablets in the hands of consumers quicker. A massive BlackBerry outage last month led to lawsuits in the US and Canada from disgruntled customers and the company recently delayed the long-awaited PlayBook OS 2.0 update until February 2012.