All Sections

RIM slash BlackBerry PlayBook production after weak sales

Woe is RIM. After six months of poor sales of its first ever tablet, the BlackBerry PlayBook, Quanta Computer, the Taiwanese company which manufactures the PlayBook for RIM, are cutting back production. The slow-down in sales has reportedly cost around 1000 Quanta employees their jobs on the PlayBook production line.

The BlackBerry PlayBook, which looked promising when it was previewed last year but suffered badly from a long pre-launch delay, shipped only 200,000 units in Q2 2011, and only 100,000 in Q3. By comparison, Apple’s iPad 2 shifted almost a million units in its first weekend.

We liked the BlackBerry PlayBook when we went hands-on with it back in July, giving the tablet 3.5/5 stars and praising its sharp screen and easy, one-handed grip. In the end, though, BlackBerry were leap-frogged by slimmer, faster Android tablets in the race to battle Apple’s iPad 2, and never really caught back up.

Source: T3.com

Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *