PlayBook OS 2.0 Delayed For Another 4 Months

10/26/2011 Comments Off on PlayBook OS 2.0 Delayed For Another 4 Months Blackberry, Mobile News Like

Not long after David Smith, the BlackBerry PlayBook Senior VP at RIM, announced in a blog entry earlier today that the PlayBook OS 2.0 will in fact be further delayed at least until February of 2012 stock prices plummeted another 6% for the already struggling company. Setbacks like these are becoming a little too common for RIM as of late and a lot of investors are not the least bit happy.

During this whole RIM and PlayBook fiasco the past 6 months or so there’s been a lot of negative press and uncertainty about the company’s future. It seems that RIM is dealing with a lot of issues they likely never bargained for when they decided to enter the tablet PC market. In their defense, many people complained that they released the PlayBook far too early and now people are complaining that the PlayBook OS 2.0 can’t come soon enough, in other words the company just can’t seem to get a break no matter what move they make (or don’t make for that matter). In the same breath, you could say these reactions are justified considering that RIM executives did promise that they would provide support for basic features such native e-mail, contacts and calendars by June. It’s now October and it looks like PlayBook owners, who have been more than patient, will have to wait yet another 4 months on top of that.

Here’s an excerpt from the blog entry David Smith wrote today:

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.

On a lighter note, last week at the BlackBerry developers conference (DevCon) RIM did provide a gold release of their native SDK (software developer kit) as well as a beta version of their PlayBook OS 2.0 to enterprise buyers and developers who are in the Early Adopter Program.

If you were looking forward to the BBM (BlackBerry Messenger) being integrated with PlayBook OS 2.0 you can axe that from your wishlist as well. David Smith also went on to say:

…we have decided to defer the inclusion of the BBM™ application to a subsequent BlackBerry PlayBook OS release

Excluding BBM from the next OS update is not exactly good for RIM since it gives competitors such as Apple even more of an advantage over them in the tablet industry. Of course it’s a bit of a disappointment for consumers as well, but at least they will still have the option to use BlackBerry Bridge software to sync data between mobile devices in real-time. Although no real specifics were given it was also stated that the PlayBook OS 2.0 would come equipped with “new functionality” to enable better communication between the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet and BlackBerry smartphones.

Also among the (hopefully) expected updates to come bundled with the new operating system next February are an all new video store, an app for both contact and calendar as well as advanced integrated email.