RIM executives had originally signaled that its next tablet version, dubbed BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0, would be available sometime this month. RIM's PlayBook launched in April to disappointing sales and lackluster reviews.
“As much as we’d love to have it in your hands today, we’ve made the difficult decision to wait to launch BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0 until we are confident we have fully met the expectations of our developers, enterprise customers and end-users,” wrote David J. Smith, RIM's senior vice president for the BlackBerry PlayBook, on the company's Inside BlackBerry blog.
The latest product delay comes after RIM's high profile developer conference in San Francisco, where the Waterloo, Ont.-based company tried to win back third-party application developers by unveiling a new, unified operating system called BBX that would run on all BlackBerry smart phones and tablets and simplify the process of creating software for the BlackBerry platform.
Just one week after Research In Motion announced its BBX operating system for BlackBerry phones and tablets, the company is facing a lawsuit over the name of the new software.
Basis International has sued RIM, alleging trademark infringement. After RIM announced its BBX software, Basis said some customers became confused as to what, if any, relationship there was between the companies.
"In addition to the inevitable confusion created by RIM's use of the mark BBX for related goods, customers and prospective customers are also likely to wrongly believe that software applications created using Basis' development tools are only compatible with RIM's BBX operating system, thus impairing and destroying Basis' reputation for providing software development tools for cross-platform development," the company said in its suit.
The suit seeks an order barring RIM from using the BBX name, plus unspecified damages.
Basis brought the suit before RIM even said when its new software would launch or which device models it would run on.
The suit is just the latest bit of trouble for RIM, whose stock price has tumbled this year as the company has lost market share to Apple's iPhone and devices running Android.
Instead of reassuring developers and customers about the viability of its network as it disclosed details on its new BBX operating system and multiplatform mobile device management software, RIM merely recapped the prior week's apology.
RIM was once a pioneer, in the days when it made sense for companies to have a service provider between their mobile phones and email. Whether an organization chooses to do email in-house or in the cloud, treating mobile email differently from standard PC email no longer makes sense. Microsoft's ActiveSync, licensed to multiple parties, including Google and Apple, is busting apart RIM's old model. BlackBerry Enterprise Server's tight security, of course, still offers companies some demonstrable value.
The question then becomes: Does RIM offer a compelling value proposition compared with other MDM players?
RIM's MDM software, called Balance, supports both the iPhone and Android platforms. It boasts many of the enhanced security features of BlackBerry Enterprise Server, but for non-BlackBerry devices. Will enterprise customers adopt this new value proposition?
There are two types of customers to consider: Those that use RIM devices exclusively or extensively, and those with many non-RIM devices.
RIM has a chance with the true believer shops. If RIM's large installed base runs away, no amount of new operating systems and MDM will save it.
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