The PlayBook Isn’t Getting an Upgrade to BlackBerry 10 After All, CEO Says

June 28, 2013

BlackBerry this morning released its quarterly earnings report and it wasn’t pretty.

One of the most embarrassing statistics for the Waterloo-based company was that it shipped a paltry 100,000 PlayBooks. This actually caused chief executive officer Thorsten Heins to go back on his word: after promising BlackBerry 10 would come to the tablet for ages, this morning he said during a conference call that the PlayBook would not be receiving and upgrade to BB10.

For those following Heins, this shouldn’t come as a surprise. Earlier this year, he suggested that tablets could be dead within five years.

“I don’t think there’ll be a reason to have a tablet anymore,” he was quoted as saying i an interview with Bloomberg at the Milken Institute conference in Los Angeles in April.

Interestingly, Heins also claimed that tablets “are not a good business model,” despite the iPad generating billions of dollars in profit for Apple.

Of course, Heins isn’t new to extreme statements. Late last year, the CEO proclaimed that BlackBerry 10 would eliminate the need for laptops. “You will not carry a laptop within three to five years,” he said last November.

This timeline—five years—is also the period in which he’s given BlackBerry to return to tech titan status: “In five years, I see BlackBerry to be the absolute leader in mobile computing—that’s what we’re aiming for,” Heins told Bloomberg. “I want to gain as much market share as I can, but not by being a copycat.”

The Waterloo smartphone pioneer posted $3.1 billion in revenue but lost $84 million. The stock plummeted more than 27% in trading today.

“During the first quarter, we continued to focus our efforts on the global roll out of the BlackBerry 10 platform,” stated Heins this morning. “We are still in the early stages of this launch, but already, the BlackBerry 10 platform and BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10 are proving themselves to customers to be very secure, flexible and dynamic mobile computing solutions.”

“Over the next three quarters, we will be increasing our investments to support the roll out of new products and services, and to demonstrate that BlackBerry has established itself as a leading and vibrant player in next generation mobile computing solutions for both consumer and enterprise customers,” he added.