BlackBerry PlayBook is ‘dead on arrival’, analyst claims

Wedge Partners principal Brian Blair on Tuesday issued a note to clients that called RIM’s upcoming virgin tablet offering “dead on arrival.” RIM is set to debut the BlackBerry PlayBook next month and opinions of press, bloggers and analysts have been very polarized thus far. Some think the PlayBook will be well received by the enterprise market, projecting that RIM could sell as many as 6 million units in the PlayBook’s first year of availability. Others, however, are not so optimistic. “[The BlackBerry PlayBook] will be sharply inferior to other tablets on the market and consumers won’t buy it,” Blair told CNBC when asked about his note to investors. “They are targeting it at enterprise but I believe very few will actually roll it out widely.” Blair says that the PlayBook’s need to be tethered to a BlackBerry smartphone in order for users to access email, contacts and the calendar is the biggest disappointment surrounding RIM’s upcoming tablet. He goes on to suggest that the PlayBook could potentially end up costing RIM “hundreds of millions of dollars” in “product development, production and related rollout and marketing costs.”

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