E-mail updates
Follow on Twitter
Subscribe to RSS
Beck Diefenbach / Reuters
Mike Lazaridis, President and Co-CEO of Research In Motion, speaks about the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet, during BlackBerry's DevCon at the Moscone West Center in San Francisco, California, October 18, 2011.
Research In Motion Ltd., the struggling maker of the BlackBerry phones, is writing off much of its inventory of PlayBook tablets, since it has to sell them at a deep discount.
The Canadian company on Friday said it's taking a pre-tax charge of $485 million in the just-ended quarter to account for the declining value of the tablets. The model originally priced at $500 now costs $200.
A year ago, co-CEO Jim Balsillie said pent-up interest in the PlayBook was "really overwhelming." Companies are looking for an equivalent of the iPad of corporate use, he said.
In March, Balsillie said "The launch of the PlayBook may well be the most significant development for RIM since the launch of the of the first BlackBerry device back in 1999."
But when the tablet went on sale in April, reviewers puzzled over the lack of email software, saying the device seemed half-baked. RIM now promises updated software in February.
RIM said it shipped 150,000 PlayBooks to stores and distributors in the fiscal third quarter, which ended Nov. 26. "Sell-through," or the number actually bought by users, was slightly higher, reflecting sales of tablets shipped earlier. It shipped 500,000 in the first quarter and 200,000 in the second.
RIM also said it sold 14.1 million BlackBerrys in the quarter, slightly better than analysts expected. Revenue and profit figures were lower than previously projected, but in line with analyst expectations.
RIM shares fell 98 cents, or 5.3 percent, to $17.60 in pre-market trading Friday. The stock hit a seven-year low of $15.98 last month.
The company is also taking a charge of $50 million for an embarrassing October outage of email and Web services that lasted days for millions of overseas BlackBerry users. It briefly spread to the U.S. and Canada before the company was able to contain the damage.
RIM reports fiscal third-quarter earnings on Dec. 15.
Leave a Comment:
I can't believe Wall Street doesn't punish them more - they have a horrible short and long term outlook and no real solution to their problems today or for the future. They are so far behind on updating their system, the phones, etc that I see no real long-term viability.
Wall Street, because so many on the Street still use BB devices, keep supporting RIM, while discounting Apple, even when financially and technologically they are so extraordinarily far ahead with a clear path forward. When RIM falters or fails, I hope those Streeters supporting them take a huge hit - they deserve to be put in their place.
RIM is either going to become a "flavor" of Android or it's going to die. It's just that simple.
.
I don't know anybody that owns or wants a playbook. They're too late to the party with a POS of a device.
It's actually a fantastic device, the company behind it sucks.
This is the first I've heard of it.
The comments here are funny. A few years ago, everyone was writing Nintnedo's epitaph. Put a fork in them, they're done, the "experts" said. Their platform was outdated and the graphics were primitive. The real competition was between the X-box and the Playstation! THey had the high-res graphics that everyone wants!
But then a funny thing. The Wii was introduced and took off. Turns out that high-res graphics are not such a big deal (the human eye can only take in so much, which is why HD has been such a flop) But the interface of a video game could stand a lot of improvments. Little handheld controllers with tiny buttons - what's not to like? Nintendo figured this out and sold a lot of Wiis.
In the tech world, you can go from Hot to Not overnight, and the pundits often call the race wrongly. Blackberry may have made a lot of missteps, but whether they are down for the count is not a call I'm prepared to make. There is no big secret to making a tablet device. If they can bring the price down and bring the content up, they may yet recover.
It worked for Nintendo....
The HD craze is nothing new. We went through it back in the '80s by hooking your VCR into your computer monitor and watching it like a TV. The compuiter monitor resolution was so much higher than the TVs it made clearer pictures. However, because the resolution was so high it would give you headaches and you couldn't watch as much - kinda like the all-day computer users.
We tested out the PlayBook for development and it was a good device, but RIM just wasn't updating the system as they promised (shocker)...then they really screwed any possibility of the PlayBook coming to fruition when they, yet again, delayed a major OS update after telling everyone they would have it in June, August, October, etc...The co-CEOs, executive management, and board should be erased from RIM...they clearly have no vision and no care in the world for how good RIM's products used to be.
Overall I don't think that RIM's day are over, they still sell millions of devices worldwide which leaves plenty of room for them to wiggle back, but they will never see the top of the mountain again.
The problem with comparing RIM to Nintendo is that Nintendo never really solved their problem - they delayed the inevitable with the Wii and to a point, their 3DS. They are not pushing forward with technology, relying instead on what's been done before. That's great for a Nintendo DS owner who wants to use their existing games in the new 3DS, but even this market has moved so quickly, especially with the advent of the iPhone and iPod touch and the plethora of game apps available. For the Wii, their technology was surpassed by - of all companies, Microsoft and their new Kinect.
For RIM, they're just not bringing any new game changers to market - something they can survive doing for only a short period of time. Just about every other handset manufacturer has better hardware than RIM - and their push email and BB messenger has enough competition between the email services and texting that can do just about everything their servers offer. They've simply relied on what they had as a crowning achievement 10 years ago - forgetting or denying that other things have become important - even more important and relevant than what they could offer.
2 years ago I remember showing a business friend my iPhone and us comparing what her BB could do. She shows me how her emails look - tiny on the tiny screen. I show her my emails on the iPhone - that look almost exactly the same as emails on a laptop and I pinch to zoom to show her how if I can't read the text, or see an image well, I can easily make it bigger. That was just the start. Web browsing, maps and all the apps - she was blown away, but said she would be stuck with BB because her company mandated it.
That kind of thinking is ending as people, consumers and business people alike, realize that there are better options out there - between Apple's iPhone and the plethora of Android smartphones.
I say let RIM fail - they deserve to - even if you consider how they brought their playbook to market. They should have been smart about it, but I don't think that's possible with them.
You people sound like you've never heard of the BB Torch...more like an Android phone than iPhone. The PlayBook is great tethered to a BB phone, otherwise pretty much sucks.