RIM Should take Criticism On the Chin

Whether there’s an extra charge to tether the PlayBook is a question that needs to be addressed by the carriers. Right now you can only use the PlayBook on WiFi or tethered to the BlackBerry smartphone. Eventually, the PlayBook is supposed to get its own 3G / 4G capability and its own email, contacts, etc.

This arrangement isn’t as cumbersome as it might seem. After all, it’s probably not often that an iPad user goes somewhere and doesn’t also take along his or her smartphone. But in this case you have no choice, and it has to be a BlackBerry smartphone.

The end result is that this choice on the part of RIM will likely limit the sales of what appears to be a fairly nice tablet. It’s a problem that RIM shares with Motorola with its Xoom tablet. Sales were less than brisk for the Xoom at least in part because many of the promised features, including 4G, were to be delivered later. For buyers, this meant that there wasn’t any good reason to rush out and buy the tablet now.

The criticisms are fair

Ultimately, these criticisms may sting a little, but they’re fair. Yes, there are icons on the PlayBook for email services, but they lead to Webmail sites. The kind of integrated email client you see on the BlackBerry smartphone won’t be delivered for a while. Balsillie said this is for security reasons, and likely it is — they need to make sure that the email client on the tablet is as secure as the one on the smartphone.

But like the security questions fielded earlier in the week, there’s an appropriate way to respond and an inappropriate way. Lazaridis made news for all of the wrong reasons, and rather than explaining to the BBC reporter that his question was astonishingly misinformed and then changing the subject, he made news by walking out. Then Balsillie made news by claiming unfairness rather than by simply moving on to the strong points that the tablet does have.

And that’s sad. The BlackBerry smartphone is still the backbone of business smartphones, the one that everyone trusts because they know it’s secure. But letting the stress of a new product launch cause problems in this way just hurts RIM and its products. True, the PlayBook isn’t everything it should be and, yes, it probably should have been a more mature product when launched, but that’s not relevant any longer. The PlayBook is here, it is what it is, and RIM needs to move forward on its strengths rather than stressing out about the weaknesses that will eventually be fixed. That assumes, of course, that they will be fixed.