Surprise! RIM’s PlayBook Launch a Success

By  |  Thursday, April 21, 2011 at 11:37 am

Bet you weren’t expecting this news. Despite the multitude of negative reviews in the press (Harry has a nice roundup here and gave the tablet a decidedly mixed review over at TIME.com), The PlayBook’s launch was not a bust at all. In fact, one could argue that it even was a success. Estimates put the sales numbers on launch day at about 50,000 units.

Now before Apple fanboys come out in force and laugh at RIM’s minor victory, lets put this into perspective. That number is more than either the Samsung Galaxy Tab or the Motorola XOOM. While the latter appears to have pretty much flopped so far, the Tab is the single biggest competitor to Apple’s tablet dominance.

Could it be that the technorati was too full of themselves in believing we had the final judgement on the PlayBook, sending it to a premature death? Quite possibly. While its still early it does kind of look like we (well, most of us) may have been wrong to say this would be a flop.

RIM, the ball is now in your court. Fix the obvious issues with your tablet and get your act together with the apps: soon we may be discussing the PlayBook in the same sentence as the Tab and the iPad.

 
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7 Comments For This Post

  1. Aaron Martin-Colby Says:
    April 21st, 2011 at 11:49 am

    Considering that the truth of the Tab and XOOM’s sales didn’t come out for awhile after launch, I’ll wait for the numbers. Still, if they managed 50,000 in a day, good show. RIM needs something, anything, to electrify their line-up.

  2. Shawn J. Roberts Says:
    April 21st, 2011 at 12:33 pm

    50,000 in day, if correct, is solid. However, couldn't that be explained away by assuming there are that many die-hard BlackBerry fans that would have bought the device if it was a toaster? The better measure of sales will be over several months won't it?

  3. Ed Oswald Says:
    April 21st, 2011 at 12:53 pm

    Agreed. But 50k for launch if right definitely isn't bad at all.

  4. David Says:
    April 21st, 2011 at 3:00 pm

    I see three issues.
    1) The iPad would have been considered a failure.
    2) Expectations were looooooooowwww.
    3) Those, most likely, were fanboys. You know, the same kind of fanboys that keep Apple out of bankruptcy? The true test that Apple keeps passing(but keeps getting retested on) is does it have legs? We'll find out…

  5. Jeremy Says:
    April 21st, 2011 at 3:05 pm

    Actually, for a company the size of RIM, 50K units for such a hyped-up product is terrible. Dismal in fact. For a company who moves over 40 MILLION phones per year, this is an *awful* result.

    Also, none of the sales reports discuss whether 50K is sell-in or sell-through – in other words, many of the Playbooks may well be sitting on store shelves…

  6. marinelayer Says:
    April 21st, 2011 at 11:38 pm

    The non iPad tablets will succeed in eating into each others' market share, not the iPad. At least for the rest of this year.

  7. IcyFog Says:
    April 23rd, 2011 at 6:06 pm

    The day of PlayBook's release I went to Best Buy, not for that but something else. A sales clerk asked if he could help me. Since he asked, I asked if they had the black, 16GB iPad 2. Nope was the response, but afterwards he was quick to pimp the PlayBook. That it was so much better than the iPad for this reason and that reason.
    Now while I realize it has some functions the iPad doesn't and vice-versa, his sales approach, dismissing the iPad, really took be aback and I thought it was unprofessional.
    Kudos to RIM for reaching 50K, but as David posted, if Apple had done that on the iPad's initial release it would have been seen as a failure.