And the Playbook looks to be a 2nd quarter release

[Pliablemoose]

Battery issues...

The new Research In Motion (RIMM) PlayBook tablet, which will launch sometime early next year, suffers from surprisingly low battery life, Kaufman Bros. analyst Shaw Wu asserts in a research note this morning.
Wu reports that the device has a battery life of just “a few hours,” compared to 6 hours for the Samsung Galaxy Tab and 10 hours for the Apple (AAPL) iPad.
“From our understanding, this could require a bit of re-engineering and [is] likely why RIMM pushed out its launch to the May 2011 quarter,” Wu writes. The analyst points out that the QNX operating system software used for the Playbook “wasn’t originally designed for mobile environments but rather for devices like network equipment and automobiles where battery life isn’t as much a constraint.” Wu reports that the company could redesign the PlayBook with a larger battery, which would make it heavier.
Meanwhile, Wu also raises some questions about the progress the company is (or isn’t) making on the apps front.
He says some developers “are questioning the wisdom of maintaining two operating systems” – QNX and BlackBerry OS 6 – “at a time where many are consolidating their efforts around iPhone and Android.” He adds that Microsoft is “courting developers pretty aggressively” for its new Windows Phone 7 platform.
According to Wu, developers are finding that the Apple App Store is the only platform they can count on to make money. “Sources indicate that Android suffers from piracy and inconsistency from users paying for apps while for BlackBerry, there are simply not enough apps and users,” he writes. “We are not sure if QNX will fix these issues.”
Wu thinks the Street is too bullish on the prospect for the PlayBook; he sees sales in 2011 of 700,000 units, while some other analyst see sales in the 1-8 million unit range. “As we have said before, we are not convinced that tablets outside of the iPad will see high volume success,” he writes.

DBZ seems to be pretty wired into BB, have you heard anything?

A redesign with a larger battery seems to be the new plan...

 

[MrX8503]

That doesnt sound good. A redesign will almost certainly mean a bigger device. The battery optimizations needs to be done on a software level.

The reason the iPad gets unrivaled battery life is twofold, it's software optimized and it has a huge battery. iOS was built from the ground up for tablet use so Apple has an advantage there. While other vendors are clamoring on what OS to use, Apple was lucky enough to have the intuition 4yrs ago that their tablet OS was lean enough to be a smartphone or a tablet.

Seeing where we are today, Google is now making a tablet driven android(honeycomb), MS is still confused as ever still trying to force Win7, and we have RIM who has the right idea, but needs some optimization work.

The tablet wars is gonna be a long one.

 

[DivideBYZero]

Not heard anything yet. Meeting up with some RIM people in the new year, so I'll get an idea. In the mean time I'm going to take an article like this that goes on to mention other platforms regardless of the battery issue with a large pinch of double strength salt. It rings about as true as the obviously paid for Droid Pro articles crapping on the Torch while copy/pasting the Moto brochure that have come out in the last few days.

 

[Pliablemoose]

So it's a conspiracy?

 

[Pliablemoose]

RIM's response to the analyst:

“Any testing or observation of battery life to date by anyone outside of RIM would have been performed using pre-beta units that were built without power management implemented. RIM is on track with its schedule to optimize the BlackBerry PlayBook’s battery life and looks forward to providing customers with a professional grade tablet that offers superior performance with comparable battery life.”

I dunno, the statement strikes me as odd, since they've only allowed very few people to even touch the device... Boy Genius Reports is the only one I know of...

 

[DivideBYZero]

Knowing the beta system inside RIM as I do, many people will have the device. Some of those may have blabbed to an analyst.

Amongst others we had the Storm 2 during beta. We had if for months before announcement. You sometimes get DAILY OS drops with custom code to remotely report error conditions, failures and unexpected reboots, etc. Sometimes a drop would be just to test very specific functions, killing some features completely, or just breaking them, or adding function that never made it into the final product. My point is this; The analyst may have seen a PlayBook with poor battery performance. He may have seen one that didn't have a browser installed if that drop was the one his mark had installed. Who knows. All I know is, he hasn't seen the final gold code. No one has yet.

 

[Kommander_Kink]

All Blackberry phones and devices coming out to "awe and shock us" are garbage. Do these guys think they can impress us with their 3-year-old technology? The Torch? Pffft, it doesn't even have super-amoled or high-definition screen, and no music player? Hahaha, it's better for RIM to stick to CEO's and middle aged business people, but that's only 10% of the smartphone market, teenagers and young adults are the main source of this market.

 

[MrX8503]

All Blackberry phones and devices coming out to "awe and shock us" are garbage. Do these guys think they can impress us with their 3-year-old technology? The Torch? Pffft, it doesn't even have super-amoled or high-definition screen, and no music player? Hahaha, it's better for RIM to stick to CEO's and middle aged business people, but that's only 10% of the smartphone market, teenagers and young adults are the main source of this market.

The Playbook is a Tablet, not a phone. From what I can see, the Playbook has very little similarities to BBs. The demo videos of the Playbook look promising and seem to have powerful hardware.

 

[DivideBYZero]

All Blackberry phones and devices coming out to "awe and shock us" are garbage. Do these guys think they can impress us with their 3-year-old technology? The Torch? Pffft, it doesn't even have super-amoled or high-definition screen, and no music player? Hahaha, it's better for RIM to stick to CEO's and middle aged business people, but that's only 10% of the smartphone market, teenagers and young adults are the main source of this market.

What are you on about? Firstly, this thread is about PlayBook, and secondly BlackBerry phones have had in built media player for YEARS, since around OS4.1. Thanks for playing.

And you know nothing of the market if you think teenagers have all the money.