The Blackberry Playbook tablet hasn"t exactly been a huge sales success for its maker, Research in Motion. To help bring some new life to the tablet, the company is apparently planning to launch a long promised feature that should make the Playbook more attractive to buyers.
Ars Technica reports that this weekend someone leaked out a version of the Android App Player designed to be used on the Playbook. RIM stated that the leaked version of the App Player is an old one but that an official and final version will be released later this summer. When it is released, the Playbook will be able to download and use all of the apps that are available to Android users. RIM announced the Android app support back in March but the feature wasn"t included when the Playbook was first released.
The Playbook itself is not an Android device; it uses the QNX operating system instead. However, it"s unlikely that the QNX platform will be a huge one for third party app development. On the other hand, putting all 250,000 apps available for Android users on the Playbook may give RIM a much more competitive tablet to sell.
The Playbook itself has been on sale in the US since mid-April but reviews of the product have been mixed. In June, RIM said it had shipped 500,000 units of the Playbook but it"s unknown how many of those units were actually sold to consumers.