RIM CEO Thorsten Heins is currently speaking during the firm’s fiscal first quarter earnings (the earnings were dismal) call where he confirmed that the company is still planning to deploy 4G LTE-enabled BlackBerry PlayBook devices. Heins said the LTE PlayBooks are currently in final testing with RIM’s carrier partners and that we can expect a launch “in the near future.” This isn’t the first time RIM has promised a 4G PlayBook, we’ve been hearing about it for the last year.
Worse, if you’re looking forward to BlackBerry 10, you’ll need to wait until the first quarter of 2013 at the earliest. RIM was already facing stiff competition from the Amazon Kindle Fire and Google’s brand new Nexus 7 tablet makes matters worse.
We’re not sure customers are going to care about 4G LTE PlayBooks by the time they do launch… if ever.
