14 DAY TRIAL // Back in November word surfaced online that BlackBerry, among other struggling companies might abandon the tablet race altogether. But recent information indicates this is not the case at all, as the device maker is considering building a successor to its PlayBook tablet endeavor, which will be released when the timing is right.
BlackBerry is a company that has mostly focused on its efforts in pushing smartphones to business users and its tablet device, the PlayBook wasn't even considered for a software upgrade when the new OS version started rolling out.
Anyway, for those of you who are still holding on to your PlayBooks, we have good news. According to new information reported by Pocket-Lint, BlackBerry hasn't given up hope that it will manage to impress tableters across the world.
Apple and Samsung are fighting for supremacy in the tablet sector, with the latter aggressively pushing new slate models since the beginning of the year. Despite this trend, VP of Global Product Management at BlackBerry, Francois Maheiu admitted the company was apparently considering another tablet.
The official wasn't able to provide any concrete details, because none has been made so far, but a new PlayBook is definitely in the cards.
The original PlayBook tablet has received a lot of mixed feedback, so in order to prevail in the growing sea of tablets, the company will certainly need to up its game considerably. Mahieu acknowledged the tablet wasn't a hit, but at least it was much appreciated by its adopters.
“When we launched PlayBook, beyond the fact that everybody knows that Playbook was not a huge success, everybody loved it.”
Rumors about BlackBerry releasing a new tablet have been circling around for some time. The most recent one dates back to November 2013, when a mysterious BlackBerry tablet showed up on the Ciol website. Oddly enough, it was listed as one of the “top 10 tablets for Christmas 2013.” It also had a mysterious description attached to it.
“The Blackberry Playbook 2 uses BB10 software that took the company over a year to create. It’s much improved on its predecessor and at just £160 / $256 /€192, it’s hard to grumble.”
Christmas 2013 has passed and we still haven’t seen anything out of BlackBerry and if we listen to the company’s official, we still have a long way before doing so.