Blackberry’s Playbook to sell for under $500 as RIM chases Apple
Research In Motion has said it will begin selling its Blackberry Playbook tablet in North America in the first quarter with a sub- $500 pricetag as it tries to take on Apple’s iPad.
RIM Co-Chief Executive Officer Jim Balsillie told Bloomberg that the Playbook “will be very competitively priced”, but gave no more details. It will have to be as RIM could do with a win as it continues to lose ground to Android.
Is the Blackberry Playbook going to win RIM new friends? It is a tough market out there and getting tougher as Samsung pushes its Galaxy Tab and the iPad continues to soak up marketshare.
Although not as much as some had hoped. The FT reported recently that Apple’s shares slipped after it said it had sold 4.2m iPads in the three months to the end of September — this is below the 5m that some had projected, but not bad at all.
News of the sub-$500 pricetag for the Playbook follows Dell dumpuing RIM and switching its 25,000 employees to the Windows Phone 7-powered Dell Venue Pro.
According to the WSJ, RIM dismissed Dell’s move as a publicity stunt: “We find it highly unlikely that they will actually save any money with this move and far more likely they were looking for a little free publicity,” said Mark Guibert, RIM’s senior vice president of corporate marketing. “Consider all the hard and soft costs of purchasing, deploying and supporting new devices and new software inside a company.”
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