By It’s no secret that RIM is cooking up their own tablet (I bet your grandfather is probably working on one too, at this point), but a little tidbit of information regarding that tablet came our way via industry analyst Ashok Kumar. According to Kumar, the tablet — which the blogosphere is already dubbing the “BlackPad” — was originally designed with the intention to have Android running the show. He also suggests that if development had continued down that path we’d be seeing it by the end of this year.
Now it seems RIM has decided to revert back to their own BlackBerry OS on the device, presumably because they have worked out the kinks of utilizing their system on touchscreen devices (for an example of how not to do that see the original BlackBerry Storm), or at least we hope. This tablet should be coming to market in early 2011.
But now we are left to wonder what an Android/BlackBerry joint venture may have resulted in. RIM certainly makes some compelling hardware, and with Android in tow it would definitely have performed. Of course, as mentioned earlier, they don’t have the greatest track record concerning full-touchscreen devices. Time will tell how the “BlackPad” measures up, but for now we can sit and dream of what could have been.
[The Street via CrunchGear]
The new speculation is that previous speculation was wrong, or has become wrong.
Further speculation to come.
From now “dave”is in charge of all comments.
They should join android generally as they have a good market.
I think the the BlackPad is a good name. Much better than BerryPad or the PadBerry.
an Android with Blackberry Push? Come on? Nothing wrong with that!