At a meeting with about 10 of Research In Motion Ltd.’s RIM-T senior managers in Waterloo, Ont., last September, the man tasked with reviving sales of the smartphone giant’s struggling PlayBook tablet came to a firm conclusion.
The company was about to announce a significant delay in a software upgrade for the PlayBook, frustrating shareholders and consumers alike. This gathering was the first time the executives were seeing all of the new features that were being considered for the device.
David Smith, who had been handed control of the PlayBook in the summer, watched a demonstration of the new software, designed to stem withering criticism from consumers and technology experts about the tablet’s shortcomings. The software was to give users the ability to type onto the device using the keyboard of a BlackBerry smartphone; an e-mail inbox with all sorts of new functions; an improved calendar in which the days of the month grow larger and bolder as events are added; and a contacts feature that pulls in LinkedIn information and a news feed about a contact’s company.
Though it would take months to perfect, Mr. Smith had a clear feeling that September day that the decision to delay the upgrade – to make users wait for months while “PlayBook 2.0” was built – was the right one. He felt that, if RIM could pull it off, the PlayBook might do for its tablet customers what the first BlackBerrys did for cellphone users, improving their efficiency and their ability to communicate.
Now he gets to put that belief to the test. RIM’s huge overhaul of the PlayBook is expected to come out this week, offering the company a second shot at getting it right.
“I knew we had to get these features in, we had to do something that would make a difference,” said Mr. Smith, senior vice-president for mobile computing, in a ground-level boardroom at RIM 20, one of the company’s many buildings that dot the city of Waterloo. “Think about this as a salesperson, you’ve got an unfair advantage. This is what made BlackBerry so compelling 10 years ago. The people with a BlackBerry had an advantage over other people around the table. … This time, it’s with a tablet.”
RIM has not made much progress in the tablet space to date. It is well behind Apple Inc.’s industry-leading iPad and other manufacturers that sell tablets running Google Inc.’s Android software.
When RIM rolled out the PlayBook in April, 2011, the device lacked many features that users had hoped for. The company immediately said a software upgrade was coming “very, very soon” – and then announced in October that the update would come only by February. Despite the PlayBook’s powerful hardware, it was panned by critics for its software flaws.
Now, Canada’s largest technology company is clearly hoping the looming release of the PlayBook OS 2.0 software update will spur widespread adoption of the tablet.
The PlayBook’s new features, with the exception of its ability to crisply run Android’s numerous apps, seem mainly geared toward RIM’s key corporate customer base. Indeed, the software update is timed to coincide with the launch of BlackBerry Mobile Fusion, which is a version of RIM’s secure enterprise service that can manage non-RIM devices such as iPhones, and BlackBerry Balance, which will allow IT departments to push work-related apps out onto a corporate firewalled section of employees’ PlayBooks.
As companies adopt the PlayBook, of course, it makes more sense for them to keep their BlackBerrys, too – even as U.S. government agencies and large corporations increasingly adopt BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) policies.
