The BlackBerry PlayBook, Research in Motion’s 7-inch tablet computing device, makes its official debut next Tuesday, April 19th., and, like with many electronic devices, review units were sent out to the big gadget blogs, tech media outlets, and journalist in advance of the launch so that reviews of the #PlayBook could help generate buzz. The problem for Jim Balsillie, co-CEO RIM, is that not that many BlackBerry PlayBook Reviews were overwhelmingly positive and he finds himself defending the PlayBook against quite a few critics…
In a in a television interview yesterday on “Bloomberg West” with Emily Chang, Balsillie had this to say…
Criticism of the PlayBook is misguided because they ignore RIM’s base of BlackBerry faithful. “I don’t think that’s fair,” more than 60 million BlackBerry smartphone users can pair their phones and PlayBooks to read e-mail and connect to the Internet. “A lot of the people that want this want a secure and free extension of their BlackBerry.”
We can’t wait to get our BlackBerry PlayBook Tuesday and give it a proper review ourselves, however, much of the criticism of the device such as lack of native email, contact, and calendar support and limited availability of applications are actually things that we knew would be criticisms, as well the should be, before these reviews came out, and Balsillie seemed to handle the objections well…
Watch the full interview here…
[Via Bloomberg]
