The news out of BlackBerry is fairly glum all the way around today, but owners of the company's PlayBook tablet may be the most miffed as they've essentially been left in old OS land.
In the midst of delivering the company's quarterly earnings report, BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins said the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet won't receive upgrades to BlackBerry 10, despite earlier plans to do so.
"We spent a great deal of time and energy looking at solutions that could move the BlackBerry 10 experience to PlayBook," Heins said, as reported by AllThingsD. "Unfortunately, I wasn't satisfied with the level of performance and user experience. So I made the difficult decision to stop these efforts and focus on our core hardware portfolio. We will, however, support PlayBook on the existing software platforms and configurations."
The decision isn't likely to sit well with PlayBook owners, considering the company promised the OS upgrade at the January launch of BlackBerry 10, and again said as much to TechRadar in March.
PlayBook down
The news was just one small piece of a larger puzzle that saw BlackBerry's fortunes drop during the previous quarter, causing yet another sharp selloff in the company's stock price.
It's a crummy development, but not a total shock: After all, BlackBerry only sold 100,000 of the flailing tablets last quarter, in addition to a modest 2.7 million BlackBerry 10 handsets.
Broken promises aside, the PlayBook shares some of the same QNX-based DNA as BlackBerry 10, so it's a bit of a head scratcher why the company couldn't wedge the latest OS into existing hardware.
More ominously, BlackBerry's CEO had little else to say about the future of the PlayBook, apparently confirming just how wrong its ill-fated marketing slogan "Amateur Hour is Over" was all along.
- Oh that's right, Heins doesn't have much faith in tablets to begin with.
