Indeed, you might remember that RIM, as they were, wrote off $485 million because of unsold inventory of the BlackBerry PlayBook. That essentially meant that nearly half a billion dollars of money was wiped away because Blackberry Playbooks couldn't be sold at a high enough price to recoup the expenditure from making them.
So this has naturally left Blackberry hesitant when it comes to tablets. Thankfully that does not mean the company has dismissed them altogether. Instead, Blackberry's CEO, Thorsten Heins, said, in an interview with Reuters, that he is still committed to creating tablet devices:
“I’m not getting out of the tablet business, I’ve asked my teams to build another one, but I need to make money from it. If the hardware doesn’t provide the margins I need, then it makes no sense in doing it”
As we move forward into 2013 Blackberry will need to seriously consider offering a tablet solution to remain relevant. Unfortunately though, the reality is that any device they offer will have to compete in a world filled with iPad's, Kindle Fires and Nexi, all of which have their own specific area of speciality and any BB10 tablet would have a hard time finding a niche in that market. Blackberry would even have a problem in their ethereal business market which is now dominated by iDevices.
We'll leave you with this from Thorsten Heins though, because the reality is that there is a much bigger picture for the Canadians at the moment than simply offering a new tablet. He said:
"Mobile computing is not going to be decided in the next quarter ... We have got to figure out as an industry how we get there. All I know is that I want us to be a leader there."Hopefully BB10 will be enough for us to see see you when we're there too Thorsten!
Via Reuters.
