The original BlackBerry PlayBook was certainly not the company’s crowning achievement. In fact, the PlayBook was such a notorious dud that BlackBerry never even bothered to upgrade it to BlackBerry 10 and former CEO Thorsten Heins said that BlackBerry was basically done with tablets for the foreseeable future. However, a new management team has taken over and with it has sprung a new sense of optimism about the company and what it can do in the future. And apparently, that even includes taking another shot at the tablet market.
In an interview with Pocket-Lint, BlackBerry vice-president of global product management Francois Mahieu said that the company is still interested in tackling the tablet market although it has no plans to do so for at least the next year. Given BlackBerry’s past flops in the tablet market, the company wants to make sure it doesn’t go to market unless it has something it thinks will be a big hit.
“When we launched PlayBook, beyond the fact that everybody knows that PlayBook was no a huge success, everybody loved it,” Mahieu told Pocket-Lint. “I wouldn’t be surprised if we have a meeting one day and I show you a tablet. We have equity in that space, but we’re not ready. We need more time.”
BlackBerry’s executive team has definitely been sounding more confident lately. BlackBerry CEO John Chen earlier this week said that his company was developing a new flagship phone that would actually steal away iOS and Android users when it launched and the company has generally been more aggressive in hitting back at perceived slights — whether they come from Ryan Seacrest or T-Mobile CEO John Legere — than it has been in the past.
