BlackBerry seals the Playbook’s fate

Mobile device manufacturer BlackBerry announced during their quarter earnings call on Friday that they won’t be shipping a BlackBerry 10 update for their less-than-stellar Playbook tablet. The company’s first tablet was released in 2011, and hasn’t been performing as expected.

“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,” BlackBerry CEO Thorstein Heins said during the call.

While the company’s revenue was up by 15% from the previous quarter to $3.1 billion, they still had a loss from continuing operations of $84 million.

According to Wired, 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.”

However, detailing all the products and service that BlackBerry rolled out over the quarter, Heins is optimistic about the future.

“The smartphone market remains highly competitive, making it difficult to estimate unit and revenue growth, and levels of profitability. Throughout the remainder of fiscal 2014, we will invest in BlackBerry 10 smartphone launches, and the roll out of BlackBerry Enterprise Server 10, to continue to establish the new BlackBerry 10 platform in the marketplace. We will also invest resources to evolve BBM into a leading cross platform mobile social messaging application, and launch other revenue initiatives associated with new services and emerging mobile computing opportunities,” he said.

Charlie Fripp – Consumer Tech editor