RIM sees PlayBook OS as 10-year future for smartphones, tablets
Research in Motion co-CEO Mike Lazaridis revealed Tuesday that the QNX-based BlackBerry Tablet OS in the upcoming PlayBook tablet will eventually make its way onto multi-core BlackBerry smartphones and different-sized tablets over the next ten years.
Lazaridis discussed the BlackBerry maker's plans Tuesday with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher at the
Dive Into Mobile conference in San Francisco, Calif., All Things Digital reports.
To kick off the onstage interview, Lazaridis showed off the upcoming PlayBook tablet, which he called "the perfect size." When questioned by Mossberg whether RIM is working on any other sizes, Lazaridis acknowledged the company's plans for different sizes.
Lazaridis emphasized that RIM is betting heavily on the PlayBook and its BlackBerry Tablet OS. "This is a complete mobile computing platform," said Lazaridis. "All of this is coming together to set up BlackBerry for the next decade."
According to Lazaridis, the 7-inch PlayBook, which RIM unveiled in September, is still "tracking" for a first quarter launch.
As RIM's smartphones begin to include multi-core processors, "they'll all be running the Playbook platform," said Lazaridis, who believes the PlayBook OS will help RIM "jump into the next decade of mobile computing."
When questioned whether RIM was leaving behind BlackBerry phones by moving ahead with next generation technology in tablets, Lazaridis emphasized RIM's global strategy. RIM won't abandon developing markets that have yet to reach 3G or 4G and can't afford high-end stuff, he explained.
Lazaridis also claimed during the interview that the BlackBerry began appealing to consumers by itself. "We didn't go out and try to make BlackBerry a consumer device. It crossed over on its own," he said.
RIM and Apple's strategies differ, according to Lazaridis. Apple is trying to upgrade a mobile phone OS for tablets, while RIM is starting with a "bona-fide mobile computing platform" for tablets, he asserted.
Referencing the iPad's lack of Adobe Flash compatibility, Lazaridis asked, "Why would you limit yourself?" In November, RIM posted a comparison video between the iPad and the PlayBook, touting the PlayBook's ability to run Flash.
The competition between Apple and RIM has increased as RIM prepares to enter the tablet market, in which Apple has taken a substantial early lead.
In October Apple CEO Steve Jobs asserted that many 7-inch tablets would be dead on arrival. RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie responded, claiming that "many customers are getting tired of being told what to think by Apple."
Lazaridis discussed the BlackBerry maker's plans Tuesday with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher at the
Dive Into Mobile conference in San Francisco, Calif., All Things Digital reports.To kick off the onstage interview, Lazaridis showed off the upcoming PlayBook tablet, which he called "the perfect size." When questioned by Mossberg whether RIM is working on any other sizes, Lazaridis acknowledged the company's plans for different sizes.
Lazaridis emphasized that RIM is betting heavily on the PlayBook and its BlackBerry Tablet OS. "This is a complete mobile computing platform," said Lazaridis. "All of this is coming together to set up BlackBerry for the next decade."
According to Lazaridis, the 7-inch PlayBook, which RIM unveiled in September, is still "tracking" for a first quarter launch.
As RIM's smartphones begin to include multi-core processors, "they'll all be running the Playbook platform," said Lazaridis, who believes the PlayBook OS will help RIM "jump into the next decade of mobile computing."
When questioned whether RIM was leaving behind BlackBerry phones by moving ahead with next generation technology in tablets, Lazaridis emphasized RIM's global strategy. RIM won't abandon developing markets that have yet to reach 3G or 4G and can't afford high-end stuff, he explained.
Lazaridis also claimed during the interview that the BlackBerry began appealing to consumers by itself. "We didn't go out and try to make BlackBerry a consumer device. It crossed over on its own," he said.
RIM and Apple's strategies differ, according to Lazaridis. Apple is trying to upgrade a mobile phone OS for tablets, while RIM is starting with a "bona-fide mobile computing platform" for tablets, he asserted.
Referencing the iPad's lack of Adobe Flash compatibility, Lazaridis asked, "Why would you limit yourself?" In November, RIM posted a comparison video between the iPad and the PlayBook, touting the PlayBook's ability to run Flash.
The competition between Apple and RIM has increased as RIM prepares to enter the tablet market, in which Apple has taken a substantial early lead.
In October Apple CEO Steve Jobs asserted that many 7-inch tablets would be dead on arrival. RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie responded, claiming that "many customers are getting tired of being told what to think by Apple."
Comments
...RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie responded, claiming that "many customers are getting tired of being told what to think by Apple."
Oh yeah? I don't think so, Jim Balsillie.
I can't wait for Jobs to introduce iPad 2. He is going to get in so many digs about the competition... its going to be hilarious!!
RIM and Apple's strategies differ, according to Lazaridis. Apple is trying to upgrade a mobile phone OS for tablets, while RIM is starting with a "bona-fide mobile computing platform" for tablets, he asserted.
Except that iOS came from Mac OS X and that iOS for iPad uses a completely rethought UI that is idealized for the display I/O.
I think RiM?s plan with QNX and, to a degree, Adobe AIR are considerably more sound than using a desktop OS or using Android 2.x on a tablet, they are acting way to cocky for a product that hasn?t proven to be viable in the market. I?m rooting for them a little less than before these quotes from Lazaridis.
Referencing the iPad's lack of Adobe Flash compatibility, Lazaridis asked, "Why would you limit yourself?" In November, RIM posted a comparison video between the iPad and the PlayBook, touting the PlayBook's ability to run Flash.
I don?t know about anyone else, but I don?t want to limit myself so I keep Adobe Flash disabled as much as possible so I can maximize the use of my battery, which I find is far more important than potentially trying to view a video from a site that is only in Flash.
I wonder how well the Blackberry phones are going to take being a digital hub streaming from carrier to WiFi for PlayBooks. That seems to eat through tiny cellphone batteries in no time.
Awesome, I want a job there: " imagine a future where you have THREE hands!!!! I bet Apple hasnt thought of that yet"
CEO: "see that it is done! I want to one-up Jobs. And make certain that a flash-version of MahJong is seen operating as a background task!"
End product: the same blackberry that was available last year with new voice commands and a suede belt clip.
I wonder how well the Blackberry phones are going to take being a digital hub streaming from carrier to WiFi for PlayBooks. That seems to eat through tiny cellphone batteries in no time.
Excellent point.
None of the encrypted data on the Blackberry will actually reside on the Playbook. When out of range of your Blackberry, the Playbook will have no email, contact or calendar data on it.
I understand that this is motivated by security concerns, but I see this as a major limiting factor. And you're right to question how this will perform. If all my contacts, email and calendar are streaming live from my Blackberry how will performance be impacted?
And by forcing all information to live on the Blackberry my devices will be doing battery double duty. Browsing emails on the Playbook will keep the bluetooth connection active draining the battery on both the Playbook and the Blackberry.
Maybe they have a magic solution to keep things moving. Otherwise, it will not be an ideal experience.
i think Mister Jimmy is confusing Apple "telling customers what to think", with Apple "making great products that customers want to buy"
but that's just me.
http://www.engadget.com/2010/12/07/m...-the-playbook/
Excellent point.
None of the encrypted data on the Blackberry will actually reside on the Playbook. When out of range of your Blackberry, the Playbook will have no email, contact or calendar data on it.
I understand that this is motivated by security concerns, but I see this as a major limiting factor. And you're right to question how this will perform. If all my contacts, email and calendar are streaming live from my Blackberry how will performance be impacted?
And by forcing all information to live on the Blackberry my devices will be doing battery double duty. Browsing emails on the Playbook will keep the bluetooth connection active draining the battery on both the Playbook and the Blackberry.
Maybe they have a magic solution to keep things moving. Otherwise, it will not be an ideal experience.
We all know what happened to the Palm Folio that leached everything from the phone.
I thought their strength was in the business arena, and my understanding is there has been a lot of interest in tablets from businesses. So why would they call their first tablet the "Playbook" and aim it at consumers? Why not leverage their reputation in business, and their Blackberry brand, to sell a serious tablet to big companies?
Playbook is a business term as well. I hear it all the time, usually in sales organizations.
In many ways they are aiming it at businesses to start. The focus on security and pairing with Blackberry's will make it easy for enterprises that already have Blackberries to deploy the Playbook.
I think behind the scenes RIM knows how they need to market the Playbook, but so far they're doing a poor job of executing on that vision.
FYI, engadget did a live blog of the interview. Poor Mike didn't seem to make any sense. And he got raked over the coals more than a few times.
http://www.engadget.com/2010/12/07/m...-the-playbook/
I posted a bunch of excerpts and comments in another thread, but basically he came off as brain damaged. Most of his answers didn't make any sense, and the tech press were openly, well, not so much hostile as dumbfounded that he was saying the things he was saying.
Oh, what the hell, here's the stuff I pulled out:
4:36PM Walt: But look, there's a growing consensus that your OS is dated. When will this become the new OS?
Mike: By focusing on the tablet market, we see it as a way of freeing where smartphones can go.
Kara: So the tablet is the phone?
4:37PM Mike: No, the tablet is what mobile computing is all about. In cases where we want a high performance smartphone, the tablet is perfect for it.
(an aside from the editors at Engadget) What? We think he's saying the phone is no good for multimedia experiences... and that RIM will hang onto its old mobile OS! Really? Really Mike?
4:38PM Mike: A lot of markets are still on 2G. Even in 3G markets, BlackBerry is in its own space and becomes very popular. What the PlayBook allows us to do is jump into the next stage of mobile. In the US the PlayBook is perfectly targeted.
Walt: I'm a little confused. You said it will free the smartphone to focus on communication. You mean it will free you to not pay as much attention to apps and video and music on the phone?
4:39PM Mike: What I'm saying is that with BB 6 it's a great multimedia platform. But the difference is, rather than being all things to all people, we can present the best platform for the application. Full web, real multitasking... very few people can do it properly. The point here is in that environment, you can use it differently. But a 7inch screen is too big to be a phone.
4:40PM Kara: So you're saying that the strategy of Google and Apple -- making the phone with video and audio, that's not the right direction?
Mike: We're going to see different categories. You're going to see smartphones taking on multicore processing, you're going to see powerful tablets...
(Another aside from Engadget) He isn't making any sense at all. Quite literally, we don't know what Mike is talking about right now.
I don't think I've ever seen such gibberish from the CEO of a major tech company, not even from Ballmer in full cry. Good lord. Don't they sit down and get their story straight, at least, even if they're not sure they can execute?
And it gets worse:
4:58PM Q -- Lance Ulanoff from PC Magazine: So I own a Torch, but it's slow and has a low res screen. I'm confused, you're creating a false dichotomy between the PlayBook and the smartphone. I don't understand that. How can you deliver this phone without the best hardware available today? You seem to be looking to the tablet for that. But this is a tiny tablet. What is the strategy? Why are you demoting my phone?
Mike: First of all, the Torch was designed to be a launch vehicle for BB 6. That argument could be used in reverse. In a world where Half VGA was high performance, the world had moved on to 1GHz CPUs and higher res displays... when you see how quickly that phone moves around, just imagine the next generation...
(Engadget again)That answer also makes no sense.
Lance: I don't see that performance. I see the lag.
4:59PM Mike: Here's another way of looking at it. If it's 1GHz now, it'll be 2GHz next year... we're bypassing the arms race and going straight to multicore. We're going to lead the way in an environment where we can scale properly without burning up the battery
So they're currently shipping underpowered, underspecced phones because presently the hardware will get better and then! Then, watch out! Because, I think, maybe they port the Playbook OS to their phones? Which seems to contradict what he was saying earlier, about how the tablet is the phone, or something? I mean, really, what the hell?
If the CEO is this much at sea about what they're doing, what hope is there for RIM to follow any kind of effective, coherent product strategy? And if they actually flounder around as madly as Lazaridis' remarks suggest they intend to, what chance do they have of competing against actually well run competitors with a disciplined roadmap?
Oh yeah? I don't think so, Jim Balsillie.
Whatever, serf
Playbook is a business term as well. I hear it all the time, usually in sales organizations.
Ah yes, you are right. I was thinking they were using it in the sense of Sony's Playstation.
When the PlayBook finally comes out, RIM will refuse to give sales numbers because they will not want anyone to know how bad it is selling. Perhaps they are hoping it will stall die-hard blackberry using enterprise customers long enough to re-write all of their smart phone software for QNX... I think the real tablet strategy is that their QNX software is not yet ready to be a smart phone. I wouldn't be surprised if they take a strategy where you get the PlayBook for free with the phone as they try to stall for time. Or maybe it is the other way around since a Blackberry phone probably costs about 50 cents to make it is getting so far behind.
QNX is a great OS, but it was designed for embedded systems. RIM will need to take it quite a bit further to make it great for smartphone/tablet apps. As was commented in the Engadget article, the video was stuttering despite having a processor that is twice as fast as the iPad and significantly more RAM.
BB6 to QNX may look like WIndows Mobile 6 to 7...
Personally though, I like QNX. I'd love this to surpass the Android phone. Targeting iOS and QNX is much easier then targeting iOS and Android. I just don't think that RIM will pull it off.
This feels like the tablet version of the Windows 7 phone...
When the PlayBook finally comes out, RIM will refuse to give sales numbers because they will not want anyone to know how bad it is selling. Perhaps they are hoping it will stall die-hard blackberry using enterprise customers long enough to re-write all of their smart phone software for QNX... I think the real tablet strategy is that their QNX software is not yet ready to be a smart phone. I wouldn't be surprised if they take a strategy where you get the PlayBook for free with the phone as they try to stall for time. Or maybe it is the other way around since a Blackberry phone probably costs about 50 cents to make it is getting so far behind.
QNX is a great OS, but it was designed for embedded systems. RIM will need to take it quite a bit further to make it great for smartphone/tablet apps. As was commented in the Engadget article, the video was stuttering despite having a processor that is twice as fast as the iPad and significantly more RAM.
BB6 to QNX may look like WIndows Mobile 6 to 7...
Personally though, I like QNX. I'd love this to surpass the Android phone. Targeting iOS and QNX is much easier then targeting iOS and Android. I just don't think that RIM will pull it off.
It's not that QNX is not ready for the smart phone --- it's rather that dual core ARM processors are still in first gen and you can't put it into a phone.
And last Friday's Playbook demo in Canada, RIM VP stated that things like the browser is not optimized yet and is still running on single core. And at tonight's presentation, the Playbook was running the most number of apps in its history of demos (and you can watch the demo video at http://video.allthingsd.com/).
"Lazaridis showed off the upcoming PlayBook tablet, which he called "the perfect size." When questioned by Mossberg whether RIM is working on any other sizes, Lazaridis acknowledged the company's plans for different sizes."
Translation: Steve Jobs said 7" was rubbish so we gotta say 7" is perfect. But just so we look forward-thinking and have an actual clue, we'll say we have plans for different sizes.
Lazaridis emphasized that RIM is betting heavily on the PlayBook and its BlackBerry Tablet OS. "This is a complete mobile computing platform," said Lazaridis. "All of this is coming together to set up BlackBerry for the next decade."
Translation: We're definitely screwed, so we hope this tablet and funky new tablet OS will save all of us from certain irrelevance. Who cares it's a tablet OS. Just say it's BlackBerry in the next decade, that will sound visionary.
According to Lazaridis, the 7-inch PlayBook, which RIM unveiled in September, is still "tracking" for a first quarter launch.
Translation: Oh gawd, I hope we pull this of. I have no idea...
When questioned whether RIM was leaving behind BlackBerry phones by moving ahead with next generation technology in tablets, Lazaridis emphasized RIM's global strategy. RIM won't abandon developing markets that have yet to reach 3G or 4G and can't afford high-end stuff, he explained.
Translation: Hell yeah we'll still be selling cheap crap all around the world... Who knows what our high-end smartphone business will be like. Just churn out our same BB OS and phones, send it to the "developing markets", because, heck, they don't care about the latest gadgets do they... Wait, do they?
Lazaridis also claimed during the interview that the BlackBerry began appealing to consumers by itself. "We didn't go out and try to make BlackBerry a consumer device. It crossed over on its own," he said.
Translation: We were sitting on our asses in our fine suits and thank goodness this phenomenon came along. But consumers suck. Let's still focus on businesses, because that's what matters, not mom and pop and kids... Yeah, I think tablets will be the future. Did I mention the tablet is the future?
RIM and Apple's strategies differ, according to Lazaridis. Apple is trying to upgrade a mobile phone OS for tablets, while RIM is starting with a "bona-fide mobile computing platform" for tablets, he asserted.
Translation: My pals at Adobe tell me Adobe Air and Flash is part of a real bona-fide mobile computing platform. What's this Unix stuff? Is that the same as QNX? It ends with an "X".
Referencing the iPad's lack of Adobe Flash compatibility, Lazaridis asked, "Why would you limit yourself?"
Translation: Again, my pals at Adobe told me that Flash is the future. Never mind most Blackberries can't even display web content, Flash is the future. And tablets. And somehow that's going to take our smartphones, into the future. Somehow.
In October Apple CEO Steve Jobs asserted that many 7-inch tablets would be dead on arrival. RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie responded, claiming that "many customers are getting tired of being told what to think by Apple."
Translation: Geez... I sure hope someone is listening to me telling them that Blackberry tablets are the future... of smartphones...
Sun Microsystems - The Network Is The Computer
BlackBerry - The Tablet Is The Phone
I can't wait for Jobs to introduce iPad 2. He is going to get in so many digs about the competition... its going to be hilarious!!
His competitors think tablets are just the sum of their components & hardware specs. That appeals to geeks, but not everyone is a geek.