Those living in the UK and who are on the O2 network will be disappointed to know that the carrier will not be bringing in the Blackberry Playbook and that they “will not be selling the device.” To quote their reasoning behind this move, “unfortunately there are some issues with the end to end customer experience.” There was no specific reasoning behind this other than what was said above but we’re guessing that the lack of native apps found (or not found) in the Blackberry Playbook may be one of the reasons.
RIM has been known for their Blackberry devices which came with certain native applications that made it so popular, namely email, calenders and contacts and of course how could we forget, BBM. Surprisingly the Blackberry Playbook did not come with these and instead users of the Playbook had to rely on the Blackberry Bridge app which basically required the user to own a Blackberry device, which would then “mirror” email, calenders and contacts on the Playbook.
If you’ve read our review of the Blackberry Playbook, you will know that apart from the lack of native apps, the device is otherwise a pretty solid piece of hardware and performs beautifully. We’re hoping that in the future, updates to the Playbook will bring about native apps and features that made RIM so famous to begin with. Until then it looks like O2 users in the UK will not be able to get their hands on the device.
Filed in . Read more about Blackberry Playbook, O2, RIM and Uk.