Things are really not looking up for BlackBerry Playbook maker RIM, as the company has announced that their operating system update for the tablet will be delayed at least until February 2012.

“As much as we’d love to have it in your hands today, we’ve made the difficult decision to wait to launch BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0 until we are confident we have fully met the expectations of our developers, enterprise customers and end-users. And here’s what we’re doing to accomplish that,” said David Smith, senior vice president for the PlayBook project.
Smith also added that the PlayBook OS 2.0 will not include the functionality of the popular BBM messaging system. “We have decided to defer the inclusion of the BBM application to a subsequent BlackBerry PlayBook OS release. We are committed to developing a seamless BBM solution that fully delivers on the powerful, push based messaging capabilities recognized today by BlackBerry users around the world and we’re still working on it.”
But Enterprise customers will be able to get their hands on the OS update in a beta phase that should start in the near future. “Shortly we will also be starting a series of closed betas of BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0 with select enterprise customers from our Early Adopter Program (EAP). These betas will be rolled out over the course of this year and are an important next step to bringing our unmatched enterprise app deployment, device manageability, security and email integration capabilities to the tablet category.”
Charlie Fripp – Consumer Tech editor