BlackBerry PlayBook Won’t Get BB10 Update Confirms CEO

The BlackBerry PlayBook tablet will not be upgraded to BlackBerry 10, CEO Thorsten Heins has confirmed, reneging on an earlier promise that it would receive the update.

Heins made the revelation in a call to investors, discussing the Canadian manufacturer’s latest results, which saw it post a £55 million loss in the first quarter of its fiscal 2014.

BlackBerry sold 100,000 tablets during the three months leading up to the end of June 2013, but Heins said the company was unable to get BlackBerry 10 to run to satisfactory levels on the tablet and therefore decided to alter its plans.

BlackBerry PlayBook

The update was promised in January, but Heins appears to be unconvinced by tablets, going on record as saying that he didn’t expect the format to last much longer. He has been guarded about the company’s future tablet strategy, saying only that it was trying to find a way to combine software and services, as it has done with its smartphones.

Despite this, he stressed BlackBerry would continue to support the tablet even though it now intended to focus on its core products.

These of course include smartphones, an area in which BlackBerry is desperately seeking to recover lost market share from the likes of Apple and Samsung. BlackBerry 10 is central to this ambition and the company has launched three smartphones, the BlackBerry Z10, Q10 and Q5, running the platform.

Heins said that the focus during the recent loss-making quarter had been on a successful launch, but the firm is also looking towards services as a way of boosting business.

Last week it announced BlackBerry Secure Work Space, a mobile device management offering that allows businesses to secure iOS and Android handsets in a BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10 (BES) environment, while it also has plans to launch a cross-platform version of BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) this summer.

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