The BlackBerry PlayBook is nearly a year old now but the seven inch tablet has suffered poor sales in its short life. Research in Motion has tried lowering its price in order to get people to try it out, with limited success. In February it released a major update for the PlayBook's OS. Now there's word that the PlayBook will be getting another big software upgrade at some point.
TechRadar.com reports that Rob Orr, RIM's vice president of product management, confirmed, "At some point after the launch we'll bring BB10 to our PlayBooks, yes." "BB 10" is a reference to Blackberry 10, the next major version of RIM's smartphone operating system. The first smartphones with BB 10 are still scheduled to be released before the end of 2012.
Meanwhile, Orr said that 50 percent of current BlackBerry PlayBook owners upgraded to the 2.0 software update within the first day of its release, saying, "It's actually quite different to our smartphone users, who are a little bit tentative to take software updates."
The PlayBook users were likely happy that the 2.0 update included a dedicated email client, which really should have been added when the tablet was first released. Meanwhile there's still no word on when, or even if, RIM will launch new PlayBook hardware.
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