The BlackBerry Playbook Will be a Gaming Platform, Writing's On the Tablet
It is fairly obvious that RIM is putting the building blocks in place for a future positioning of the new Playbook as a gaming platform, most likely in their next model. After sifting through the last few week’s industry chatter and reviews of the Playbook it seems that this connection has gone unnoticed. The industry impression of the Playbook is of an unfinished product that was rushed to market, though RIM promises upcoming free software upgrades.
Fair enough. But RIM is clearly positioning the Playbook for the enterprise market in this first iteration. The Playbook only has Wi-Fi connectivity and to access the mobile networks or access your email app you need to establish a Bluetooth bridge with your BlackBerry smartphone. This might seem like a clumsy solution but is actually a “CIO-friendly” move as most corporate users in the target market already own a BlackBerry smartphone. From a marketing perspective, it is the right tactical move for RIM to get the tablet accepted as a dull product in the enterprise market before embarking on a gaming strategy.
There are a number of indications that the Playbook is designed to be a gaming platform. RIM’s new operating system QNX is a fast and very stable real-time OS. QNX will easily compete with Android, iOS, and WP7 in terms of raw performance. And at the BlackBerry developer conference last fall, the QNX founder Dan Dodge said: “The Playbook will be an incredible gaming platform for game designers”.
The design choice by RIM to equip the Playbook with high quality sound, HD-video, and a fast dual-core processor also fits with this strategy. Another sign is the recently announced alliance with the two cross-platform game engine firms Ideaworks and Unity. This will make it easy to quickly port the hundreds of gaming apps using Ideaworks SDK the Playbook.
Continued on the next page
Follow Technorati