TORONTO: Even though the BlackBerry PlayBook has the technical prowess to impress the most discerning tech connoisseurs, few consumers will get their hands on Research In Motion's new tablet until after the holidays. The Canadian tech leader, which unveiled the device at a developers conference in San Francisco on Monday, has scheduled its general release for the new year.
As a consequence, RIM may have to be content for now with owning the corporate segment, where its roots run deep. Analysts say that may prove a nice problem to have. Over the long term, the PlayBook's pedigree and RIM's known strengths in security and system management could enable the company to capture a huge chunk of a nascent market that is liable to balloon.
"People are talking about this as a work tool, and the enterprise market could be 40 percent of the tablet market in 2014. In some ways, the virtues of tablets — cheap, easy to use, virus-resistant — are enormously appealing to businesses," Deloitte Canada's Duncan Stewart said. That said, if RIM is hoping to pull consumers away from their iPods and Google Android-based devices, missing the biggest selling season of the year is a fairly major misstep, analysts say.
In recent months, the Canadian company was quiet but not idle while rival handset and PC makers, most famously Apple with its iPad, announced plans for tablet computers, keyboard-less devices with more processing power and screen size than smartphones.
RIM bought a number of companies and got to integrating their assets, which show up in the PlayBook's operating system, its ability to mirror a BlackBerry smartphone and the company's revamped advertising platform. Its tech specifications aren't to be sniffed at either – its 1 Gb of RAM is double that in Samsung's Galaxy Tab and four times the iPad. Its two cameras allow videoconferencing, while the iPad doesn't have a camera. Its dual-core processor promises fast responses and seamless multitasking. "RIM bought the software company that's basically the brain of the machine five months ago," said Sean Kraus, chief investment officer at CitizensTrust in Pasadena, California, who believes the company should have moved more quickly.
"To announce a new product five months later, with the product coming out next year, is pretty sad." By the time the first PlayBook devices are sold, they will likely have to share shelf space with a second-generation iPad, a webOS tablet from Hewlett-Packard and Android-based tablets from Motorola and many others. Shares of the Waterloo, Ontario-based company traded down 3 percent throughout Tuesday, mostly because of the delayed launch.
The stock jumped about 2 percent immediately after the PlayBook announcement. But analysts point out that most consumers work in businesses too. Just as the iPhone has pushed its way into boardrooms, the PlayBook is consumer-friendly enough to be bought by individuals who may then use it for work. In other words, the barriers between the two markets are permeable.
The chief information officer at German software maker SAP AG expects the PlayBook to be integrated into corporate systems much quicker than other devices on the market or soon to enter the market. "The PlayBook is perfect for the enterprise environment," Oliver Bussman said, pointing out no one device will be dominant for some time.
"The consumer also brings expectations and requirements to the corporate world" and that should help PlayBook's overall acceptance, he said. SAP, the world's biggest maker of business software, is betting on an increasingly mobile workforce. It paid $5.8 billion for database company Sybase this year to move ahead of archrival Oracle Corp in the mobile data market.
Bussman said many SAP applications are Flash-enriched and web-enabled, giving PlayBook an advantage over the iPad, which does not support Flash. "The mobile integration will be easier, plus from a security point of view, the BES environment — the encryption — that is something where the PlayBook is advanced," he said, referring to RIM's enhanced BES security features.