Research in Motion releases statement on delay of BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0 until February

It turns out that the rumor that BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0 was delayed until February true, and, as has been the case lately with RIM, the reality for RIM turns out to be worse than the rumor.  Not only is BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0 not coming out until Feb., it will not include native BBM support.

We know that many of you are looking forward to BlackBerry® PlayBook™ OS 2.0, and we wanted to provide you with an update on the progress that we’re making.

As much as we’d love to have it in your hands today, we’ve made the difficult decision to wait to launch BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0 until we are confident we have fully met the expectations of our developers, enterprise customers and end-users. And here’s what we’re doing to accomplish that.

First off, we have decided to defer the inclusion of the BBM™ application to a subsequent BlackBerry PlayBook OS release. We are committed to developing a seamless BBM solution that fully delivers on the powerful, push based messaging capabilities recognized today by BlackBerry® users around the world and we’re still working on it. In the meantime, BlackBerry smartphone users will be able to continue to use BlackBerry® Bridge™ to securely access BlackBerry® Messenger™ on the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet’s high resolution display.

Secondly, we are excited to now be providing developers with the gold release of the native SDK for the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet as well as a beta of BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0 (launched last week at BlackBerry DevCon Americas). The developer beta allows developers to begin porting their native apps to the PlayBook platform. In the following months, the developer kit will be updated with the full Cascades animation and UI engine that was first demonstrated at BlackBerry DevCon. We expect that the developer beta will generate thousands of new applications for BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0.

[Via Inside BlackBerry]