RIM’s first tablet, the BlackBerry PlayBook, has reportedly sold 250,000 units after the first month in stores, and Wedbush Securities analyst Scott Sutherland estimates sales by the end of the quarter (i.e. this month) to be in the 450,000 range. While that sounds decent, Sutherland soured his outlook on RIM. Early pre-launch estimates for PlayBook sales in Q1 went as high as 1 million, which at the time didn’t sound crazy considering we had heard RIM was making 200,000 PlayBooks each month.
While the commercial success of the BlackBerry PlayBook is still somewhat murky, we can say with that the hardware is solid, and the software, despite some gaps, is improving. The 7-inch 1024 x 600 display and stereo speakers do a great job of showing high-def video, and the dual-core 1 GHz processor and 1 GB of RAM can handle some very rich applications (though we’ve seen relatively few so far). Bridge is still something of a sore point, which essentially shackles the PlayBook to a BlackBerry smartphone if you want access to native e-mail, calendar, contacts, and memopad apps (although web-based and third-party alternatives are available until RIM releases stand-alone versions this summer). We have a full review of the pre-release BlackBerry PlayBook over here.
RIM remains confident about the PlayBook’s sales performance in light of murmurs from retail that it’s missing targets and suffers a high return rate, but I guess we’ll have to wait until their quarterly report to find out just how well (or poorly) it did.
[via Barron’s]