RIM Halts BlackBerry Playbook Production, Some Say

 Has Research in Motion stopped making its BlackBerry Playbook tablet computer? Portfolio.com reports that Research in Motion has stopped manufacturing the tablets and is considering exiting the tablet market altogether.


"We believe RIM has stopped production of its PlayBook and is actively considering exiting the tablet market," Collins Stewart tech analyst John Vinh said in a report. The chip analyst said manufacturer Quanta had laid off a "significant number" of workers from a factory that produces RIM's PlayBook. RIM denies report


RIM dismissed reports that its PlayBook was in danger of extinction as "pure fiction." RIM spokeswoman Jamie Ernst said, "RIM remains highly committed to the tablet market."

RIM may have halted BlackBerry Playbook production

RIM Share, Earnings Fall in 2nd Quarter

So there has to be concern now that RIM, a star in the mobile handset space, might suffer a similar fate, as hard as that is to imagine, though it once might have seemed unthinkable.

Canadians, more than other people, are going to worry about what is happening at Research in Motion, for reasons of national pride and influence in the broader telecom business. Nortel once was the biggest company in Canada, by valuation, as I recall, and no longer exists.

For the first time in over a decade, shipments of BlackBerry smart phones have declined, year-over-year, RIM second quarter results show. RIM also said it shipped fewer than half of its PlayBook tablets than it did in the previous quarter. Revenue declines

Revenue was down 15 percent to $4.2 billion from last quarter’s $4.9 billion, which, to be fair, is what it predicted it would make. But it’s on the lower end of the scale. Last quarter, RIM estimated that its second quarter revenue would be between $4.2 and $4.8 billion.

Revenue was down 10 percent from the $4.6 billion RIM made in the same quarter last year. RIM smart phone, tablet shipments decline (Wall Street Journal subscription required)

Although BlackBerrys have dominated the corporate smartphone market, their popularity in the consumer market has been short-lived. U.S. consumers have moved on to phones with big touchscreens like Apple's iPhone and various models that run Google Inc.'s Android operating system.

"They are just not selling. They are not competitive," said Peter Misek, an analyst at Jefferies & Co. "They are getting really hit hard by Android phones."

HP TouchPad to Feature Music and Video Streaming

HP's new "TouchPad" tablet will come with a music syncing solution, using cloud servers to sync and remotely store music. The music app also will ensure that the music the user is most likely to listen to is cached locally on the device.

The service reportedly also will allow TouchPad owners to stream music that they don’t yet own, and might also support streaming of music to HP smart phones.

None of that is too surprising, given the heavy content consumption use tablets get. 

TouchPad to include smart-caching cloud-based music syncing, video store

Nexus X Tablet Boot-Up Screen

Not a suggestion you buy a tablet device for the boot-up screen. But it won't hurt, either. And here's a bit more detail on the new Android tablet operating system, "Honeycomb."

A 42-Inch Android Tablet? Seriously?

Apparently this is a test of potential demand for a 42-inch-screen Android tablet. Not sure it makes much sense for most people, but I can imagine lots of point-of-sale display applications.

PC Sales Up by 52% Next Five Years, Forrester Says

Apple CEO Steve Jobs has compared the PC to a farm truck, saying that when America was an agrarian economy, “all cars were trucks because that’s what you needed on the farm."

The analogy is that PCs will be displaced by new devices such as the iPad.

Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO, obviously does not agree. “I think people are going to be using PCs in greater and greater numbers for years to come," he said. "The PC as we know it will continue to morph form factor."

Semantics aside, there still is a question: is the iPad something new, a new market, or simply a new PC form factor? Steve Jobs may not view the iPad as a PC, but we do, says Sarah Rotman Epps, Forrester Research analyst.

"Our view is that the consumer PC market in the United States is indeed getting bigger," she says. "Over the next five years, PC unit sales across all form factors will increase by 52 percent."

Desktops are the only type of PC whose numbers will be fewer in 2015 than they are today, she argues.

Growth will come from new form factors like tablets, but laptop sales will increase steadily also.

Tablets will, however, cannibalize netbooks, outselling netbooks starting in 2012.

In 2015, 23 percent of all PCs sold to consumers in the US will be tablets.

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E-Reader Maker IRex Files For Bankruptcy

E-Reader maker IRex Technologies has filed for bankruptcy, citing disappointing sales of its consumer device in the United States.

The firm's DR800SG e-reader was notable because it used an “open” model that gave publishers lots of control over how their content was distributed. Unlike the Kindle, for instance, publishers could set their own pricing. But most observers expected there would be a shake out in the market, and that now has happened.

E-Reader Maker IRex Files For Bankruptcy | paidContent

Apple Offers "Curated Computing," Not "Open"

The conventional wisdom is that open and standardized platforms are better than closed platforms, for any number of practical reasons, ranging from cost speed and speedier innovation to applications richness. For some, that is the importance of the "network neutrality" debate, though oddly, innovation arguments can be made on both sides, or all sides, of the argument.

But Apple always has been the salient exception to the "open and standards based" rule. In the past world, where Apple as a PC manufacturer and had three percent to four percent market share, that might not have mattered much. In today's world, where Apple emerged from nowhere to dominate the MP3 player market, then reshaped the mobile handset market and seems to be on the cusp of validating a new market for tablet devices, Apple's approach will be more important.

The iPad might be a new kind of PC, or might reshape existing devices; it is hard to tell at this point which future is more likely. But either way, Apple is creating what might be called "curated computing," where choice is deliberately limited to improve end user experience, says Forrester Research analyst  Sarah Rotman Epps.

Curated computing is perhaps a new mode of computing in which choice is constrained to deliver more relevant, less complex experiences, says Rotman Epps, in some ways resembling the old AOL approach, or even mobile service provider "walled garden" portals. You might argue that those approaches do not seem to have worked too well, but Apple always seems to be the exception to the rule.

It might be a bit of a stretch, but the analogy might be that a PC is a general-purpose computing platform, while an iPad is something more like an iPod. That is not to say iPad users cannot send and receive email and surf the Web, but simply that the principle is that "general purpose" computing is not the point.

Rather, users default to curated applications as the primary use mode, with Web surfing, email and other experiences being somewhat secondary. Put another way, where the Web is the default mode for most Internet-connected computing devices, the application is more the default mode for iPhones and iPads.

The broader question always seems to come back to the issue of how much choice users really want, and how much experience is enhanced when choices are limited. Apple always has delivered an enhanced end user experience precisely because its hardware choices were limited to "my way or the highway."

In all likelihood, should the tablet trend establish that there is a discrete new class of devices and behaviors suitable to less "general purpose" computing and more "content consumption," then curated experiences might be viable in a way that would defy the historical failures of walled garden approaches.

Should that prove to be the case, at least some in the mobile ecosystem might have to rethink the historic preference for open and standards-based development and "run time" environments.

What do you Think of This Google Tablet?

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I don't know what you think, but this Android-powered tablet, if it winds up being a commercial product, does not seem to have the "wow" factor of the Apple iPad.