Here’s a Friday morning PSA for you BlackBerry PlayBook owners: if you were feverishly clutching your tablet in hopes that BlackBerry would finally update it with a shiny new OS, you can finally put them down. BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins just confirmed during the company’s Q1 earnings call that the BlackBerry 10 won’t be coming to your aging doodad.
Tough break, folks.
Specifically, Heins said that he was “not satisfied with level of performance and user experience” of BlackBerry 10 on the PlayBook, though he quickly added that the company would continue to “support PlayBook on existing software platform and configurations.” Understandably, it just didn’t make sense for the company to continue devoting time and effort to the project (especially considering the tablet is about two years old). Going forward, Heins also noted that BlackBerry only aims to have about six products in the market at any given time, and hopefully that “more wood behind fewer arrows” approach works out. And hey, one of them may be a BB10-powered phablet, which kinda sorta jibes with Heins’ belief that tablets won’t be around for too much longer.
It’s a fair enough reason–BlackBerry has limited resources with which it’s attempting to perform the mother of all mobile turnarounds–but the company hasn’t exactly been keeping people’s expectations in check. Last month an errant tweet from a BlackBerry Mexico employee indicated that the update would be hitting devices within the next few weeks, a scenario that will (sadly) never play out. Still, for a tablet that launch in April 2011, BlackBerry is still doing a decent job at moving them — the company pointed out in today’s earnings release that it shipped 100,000 PlayBooks over the past quarter.