14 DAY TRIAL // Canadian mobile phone maker Research In Motion is set to make the new Blackberry PlayBook tablet PC available for purchase on the United States market before the end of the first quarter of the ongoing year, a company's official confirmed in a recent interview.
Stephen Bates, the UK managing director at RIM, was the one to confirm that the handset vendor plans on having the tablet PC on sale in the United States in Q1 2011, and that it would put it on sale in Europe starting with the second quarter of the year.
“End of Q1 for US. Europe is Q2. UK will be one of the early ones,” is what Stephen Bates told Pocket-lint when asked about the availability of the new device.
This statement seems meant to put an end to rumors regarding the fact that RIM might have pushed back the tablet PC to the second quarter of the year.
Not too long ago, April 10th was said to be the day when the company would make the new device available for purchase, but it appears that the handset vendor would manage to put it on shelves earlier than that.
Today's mobile space is moving towards the consumption of content and media, as users would be looking at something more than just access to social networking, Bates stated.
While smartphones offer an option for that, tablets are expected to prove the right answer, courtesy of their larger screens, and the PLayBook is seen as a winner from this point of view.
“At CES and MWC we launched a number of connection variants of the PlayBook: Wi-Fi only, HSDPA, 4G; and we think tablets will be a really important form factor to help deal with this third collision of media, Internet, and mobility, allowing you to consume content in a different way,” Stephen Bates explains.
“We think we will bring a uniqueness to this market. We have a loyal base of BlackBerry users that are used to multitasking, to push architecture, and we want to accelerate and accentuate their experience of BlackBerry as a platform using the PlayBook.”
What Bates did not confirm as of yet is whether the tablet PC would indeed be capable to run Android applications, just as reported several days ago.
Some of the previous analyst forecasts suggested that RIM would manage to sell a number of over 1 million PlayBook devices during the first quarter of 2011, and that it would move over 6 million units within the first 12 months of availability.
With March already on the way, and the BlackBerry PlayBook nowhere on shelves at the moment, it remains to be seen whether the company would indeed manage to meet these estimates or not.