RIM selling Playbook at deeply discounted $300 price point

 

Research in Motion is doing its best to put the Playbook tablet in your home as today the company announced another super sale.  This time around, you can get the Playbook for $300 on the RIM website, Wal-Mart, Radio Shack and Best Buy retailers.  The Playbook sells for $599 for the 32GB model and $699 for the 64GB model.  The Playbook also comes in a 16GB model that is currently selling for $199 in some places.  The Wi-Fi only tablet isn’t exactly on the top of consumers list of things to buy these days, but the discount might lure new tablet owners as they look for affordable options to the iPad and others.
Buy the RIM Blackberry Playbook 16GB for only $199.
The Playbook was introduced to the mobile world last year and right off the bat sold over 500,000 units in a three month period.  Since those first three months the sales have been in a downward spiral even though the company has tried to boost them with discounts like the one mentioned here.  At the end of the summer, Best Buy took $100 off the sale price to lure in shoppers and that was on all the available models.  In October, RIM went ahead with a two-for-one sale in hopes of getting more Playbooks out of the stores, but it didn’t seem to do any good.
Finally, in December, news came that RIM was going to trash the whole Playbook idea altogether and took a hit on the books worth $485 million.  That cost was for the rest of the Playbook inventory which totaled more than 970,000 units.  The Playbook has taken its share of hits with poor sales, but it was also ranked very low in comparisons to other tablets on the market.  Bad reviews, no application support, email or personal info manager are some factors that kept the shoppers from heading out to buy one.
The Playbook isn’t the only tablet that has suffered, even after the holidays.  Sony just cut the price of their Tablet S in hopes of gaining more sales since the New Year.  The Tablet S isn’t as affordable as the Playbook with the 16GB model starting at now $400.  The issues with Sony’s Tablet S didn’t stem from poor reviews and confusion though.  The Tablet S got excellent reviews online, including a quote from PCWorld that said, “The Tablet S shows that the consumer electronics giant has not lost its design mojo over the years, as this model brings Sony’s originality and flair to a tablet market that desperately needs both.”