BlackBerry PlayBook Tablet to Launch in March 2011

BLACK BERRY PLAY BOOK TABLET

Research in Motion has been pretty coy about when the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet will actually be available to consumers, but some recent comments in an earnings call give a hint of when we can expect RIM's tablet.

An RIM spokesperson was talking about when the company expected to see revenue from its tablet (indicating when it will go on sale), and said it would be next year.


"There are no PlayBook revenues included in our Q4 guidance, and we expect the first revenue impact from PlayBook will be in RIM's first quarter," she said. Before you jump to the conclusion that this means January, take a second look at that statement. She said Q1 of the company's fiscal year, not calendar year. To confuse matters further, she later stated that the device would ship in the first quarter of the calendar year.

While it's confusing at first, those two pieces of information actually give us a pretty good idea of when the PlayBook will launch. RIM's fiscal year doesn't start until March, which is also the last month of the first calendar quarter. That means that RIM plans to start selling the dual-core PlayBook in March 2011. This isn't an official announcement, and RIM can obviously change the date before then, but it gives us a good idea of the dates RIM is aiming for. TECHNEWS DAILY