According to Kaufman Brothers analyst Shaw Wu, Research in Motion may delay the release of their highly anticipated tablet, the BlackBerry PlayBook, due to poor battery performance. Wu claims that his sources are telling him that the BlackBerry PlayBook only gets a couple of hours of battery life compared to 6 hours on the Android powered Galaxy Tab and 10 hours on the iPad. It may take RIM until May to get the battery issues resolved which would be seen as a huge miss for RIM, and, the worst possible timing ever.
The iPad was the only game in town until the Galaxy Tab came out and RIM had the opportunity to be the first dual-core tablet on the market early next year, however, if the PlayBook launch date slips into May, beyond the release of the 2nd generation iPad as well as the launch of every other tablet coming in the first half of next year, the PlayBook will be seen as an also have device as compared to a market leader.
If these battery issue rumors are true Research in Motion needs to do everything possible to address them and release the PlayBook in Q1. RIM doesn’t have the luxury of having tens of millions of users already using their tablet and there is really no reason for a consumer wanting a tablet device to wait when there are so many more options available to them won’t be perceived as having had issues even before they were released.
[Via BGR]