PlayBook will not get BlackBerry 10

Spare a thought for BlackBerry PlayBook owners. The BlackBerry tablet will not be getting on to the BB10 train after all, as was promised back in January this year.

BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins announced during the lackluster earnings conference call on Friday that the company was abandoning all plans to bring the BlackBerry 10 OS to BlackBerry Playbooks. Heins said that while his teams had spent a great deal of time and energy to optimise the BlackBerry 10 for the PlayBook but he was unsatisfied with the level of performance and user experience.

Never happening

Heins said that owing to this, he decided to take the difficult decision to axe plans of bringing BB10 to PlayBook and instead set his team to concentrate efforts on to the company’s core hardware portfolio. “We will, however, support PlayBook on the existing software platforms and configurations,” he added “BlackBerry has made a lot of steady progress in the past year.”

Heins has done a flip-flop on his stance about tablets and its fate in the markets since the past couple of months. While in April he said that he “didn’t see a place for tablets in the next five years,” in May, during a Q&A session he said about tablets, “we believe in a single element of mobile computing: one on your hip.” A month later now, he’s axed plans to take his own tablet to the next level.

Considering the tablet is about two years old, it does make sense for BlackBerry to concentrate its efforts elsewhere and let the PlayBook die a gradual death, but the news will not go down too well with owners of the tablets around the world. The company had, after all, promised them a complete BB10 experience on the 7-inch tablet. However, it is now clear that it will not be happening ever.