Doing the right thing can be tough. But today, BlackBerry did the right thing.
After promising its less-than-stellar PlayBook tablet would receive the BlackBerry 10 OS update, the Ontario-based company has reversed its decision to support the tablet. The PlayBook will no longer be part of the BlackBerry 10 upgrade roadmap. CEO Thorstein Heins shared the information during the company's first-quarter earnings call.
"Our teams have spent a great deal of time and energy looking at solutions that could move the Blackberry 10 experience to PlayBook. But unfortunately, I am not satisfied with the level of performance and user experience, and I made the difficult decision to stop these efforts and focus on our core hardware portfolio," Heins said during the call.
BlackBerry posted a $84 million loss from $3.1 billion revenue. While revenue rose 15 percent, the loss hit the company hard. Shares dropped 25 percent after the quarterly results were announced. Removing the PlayBook from the lineup makes sense, and it's curious that the company hadn't done so earlier.
This effectively ends the life of the PlayBook. The tablet had difficulty gaining traction in a market dominated by Apple's iPad and saturated with Android tablets. Only 100,000 PlayBooks were sold during the first quarter. During Apple's latest quarterly results the company sold 19.5 million iPads.
If you happen to own a PlayBook, BlackBerry will continue to support the device. Also, wow, you have a PlayBook?
