RIM 'planning BlackBerry Blackforest tablet for 2013'

squadMCU — Fri, 08 Oct 2021 04:56:05 GMT

Current Revision posted to Documents by squadMCU on 10/8/2021 4:56:05 AM

A BlackBerry blog posted what it claims is a leaked internal document from RIM showing the company's plans for the future. The 'roadmap' shows a 4G BlackBerry PlayBook, which is likely to be US-only, for the end of this year, as well as new BlackBerry 10 devices for early 2013.

It is the inclusion of a new tablet, codenamed Blackforest, that has attracted the most interest, however. It has been speculated that this new tablet, which is listed in the roadmap for the third quarter of 2013, might have a 10-inch screen, larger than the PlayBook's 7-inches, and could have as much as 128GB of storage.

Two other products are slated to appear next year but they are referenced only by their codenames: "Nashville" and "Naples".

Last week, RIM said that it was delaying the launch of BlackBerry 10, the next version of its operating system. Shares fell 20 per cent after the announcement.

"What RIM really needs is this next generation product line to be a success and that delay is damaging them," said Ian Fogg, senior principle analyst at Screen Digest.

"The market is losing confidence in RIM," he added. "The management team at RIM has to speak up for their products."

In its most recent quarter, RIM said it sold 7.8 million devices, a figure put into perspective at Google's I/O developer conference where the search giant announced one million Android activations every day.

This morning, Thorsten Heins, RIM's chief executive, responded to analysts who said the company was in a "death spiral". He said: "There's nothing wrong with the company as it exists right now."

Source: The Telegraph

Tags: blackberry, blackforest, rim