RIM: BlackBerry PlayBook Hitting 16 Additional Markets Over The Next 30 Days

Robin Wauters

Robin Wauters is the European Editor of tech blog The Next Web and lead editor of Virtualization.com. He was a senior staff writer at TechCrunch until his departure in February 2012. Aside from his professional blogging activities, he’s an entrepreneur, event organizer, occasional board adviser and angel investor but most importantly an all-round startup champion. Wauters lives and works in... → Learn More

Friday, June 10th, 2011

BlackBerry maker Research In Motion (RIM) this morning announced intentions to debut the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet in an additional 16 markets over the next 30 days, including the UK, Hong Kong, France, India, Spain and Australia.

So far, RIM’s iPad competitor has only been available to customers in North America (since April 19, 2011), and has drawn mixed reviews.

For our own reviews, see MG Siegler’s take and the Fly or Die edition with Erick Schonfeld and John Biggs covering the BlackBerry PlayBook.

Some analysts have estimated RIM to sell 3 million PlayBook tablets during their first year, but the company faces competition not only from Apple’s iPad(s) but also an increasing wealth of Android-powered tablets (and in the future perhaps also from Amazon and Microsoft).

The full list of countries that will see the launch of the PlayBook over the next few weeks: UK, Spain, France, The Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, UAE, India, Hong Kong, Singapore, Indonesia, Australia, Mexico, Colombia and Venezuela .