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PlayBook Sales May Begin to Plateau

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Despite an early good start to its debut tablet, Research in Motion’s BlackBerry Playbook may be reaching a point where sales are plateauing, if not tapering off. Predictions of the latest sales number come from Wedbush Securities analyst Scott Sutherland, who believes that sales figure for the tablet will be no more than 450,000 units in the spring quarter, ending this month.

In its debut, the PlayBook seems to fare better than Android 3.0’s Honeycomb debut, which was first released on the Motorola Xoom slate for Verizon. The PlayBook moved 250,000 units in the first month compared to the Xoom, which moved the same number in five weeks.

Sutherland believes that RIM would be able to move 2.3 million PlayBook units by the end of its fiscal year, which ends next February.

The analyst predicts that the PlayBook would outsell the Xoom, which has been criticized for a high $800 price tag at launch with Verizon for inclusion of 3G mobile broadband connectivity, upgradeable to 4G LTE in the summer, and a $600 version for a WiFi-only model. The PlayBook, in contrast, launches with WiFi-only and has a $500 base price for a 16 GB model. The tablet is available in 16, 32, or 64 GB, and a 4G WiMax version is headed to Sprint this summer.

Despite the fact that the PlayBook was launched with many more apps–RIM says in the thousands–than the Motorola Xoom debuted with on Android Honeycomb, the tablet is still being criticized by some for not delivering enough high-profile titles, like the Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, Slingplayer, and Netflix apps. Additionally, my critique would be that despite the inclusion of a GPS radio even on the WiFi-only model, the PlayBook still doesn’t have a turn-by-turn GPS app with voice-guided instructions. The 7-inch screen would make the tablet a great car companion and is more portable than larger 10-inch slates, like the iPad and Xoom.

Via: Electronista

10 Comments

10 Comments

  1. MikeF

    05/26/2011 at 3:50 pm

    We have a Playbook and love it – I watch Youtube videos on my big TV now since I bought a HDMI-microHDMI 15 ‘ cord, it’s awesome and hooked up to my receiver via an audio optical cord.  Plays all flash videos, by wife loves the Kobo reader and finds reading on the Playbook great and I just love reading the news in my back room on it.  The 7 inch size is perfect, we also have carried it to clubs in her purse (IPad too big for that) and videod some favourite groups.  Also a nice size in our small kitchen looking up recipes and my wife goes on Facebook without using the app, no need to in her mind.  We are thinking of getting another one actually.  And it’s user friendly for us not so techie types.   Yes, I would like it to be able to read DRM ebooks and hopefully this will come shortly as borrowing ebooks from my public library should be able to be read on this device which it currently can’t unless you do DRM stripping and converting to pdf which shouldn’t be necessary.

  2. Aaron Patton

    05/26/2011 at 8:23 pm

    Xoom didn’t sell 250,000 in 5 weeks.  It shipped 250,000 in 5 weeks, it only sold through 100,000.  Playbook sold 50,000 on it’s first day and 250,000 in one month.

  3. J-Credible

    05/31/2011 at 6:35 pm

    How could sales have potentially plateaued already when it hasn’t even yet been released globally yet, and arguably the largest tech markets for Blackberry devices. (South Africa, UK, India, China).

    Is there a breakdown somewhere of how Scott Sutherland came to his numbers?  Just curious.

  4. Rich

    08/30/2011 at 9:32 pm

    Most doom and gloom articles about RIM are written by bloggers who own an iPhone or a Droid and also own stock in the same companies.  So it’s not exactly an objective opinion IMHO.

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