The Blackberry Playbook tablet won't be put up for sale today at a major UK retail store. Tablet Planet reports that retailer O2 has decided not to sell the new tablet device from Research in Motion. According to the story one of the largest UK mobile phone carrier and retailer felt that the product had "issues with the end to end customer experience" but didn't go into detail on exactly what that might mean. The tablet was scheduled to begin selling in the UK beginning today.
Another bad development for the Playbook is a new lawsuit filed by Dolby Laboratories this week. The company said that RIM has violated Dobly's patents for "covering highly efficient digital audio compression technologies." It is demanding that sales of many of RIM's products, including the Blackberry Playbook, be halted as part of the lawsuit.
These developments comes on the heels of Research in Motion's announcement today that it has shipped a total of 500,000 units of the Blackberry PlayBook tablet product. The shipment numbers come as part of RIM's quarterly financial results which were officially announced today. RIM did not say how many of the Blackberry Playbooks had actually been sold to consumers. The tablet product was first released in the US in late April.
Revenue for RIM's first quarter came in at $4.9 billion with profits of $695 million, according to today's press release. RIM had already announced back in April that revenues would be lower than what the company originally predicted. RIM said it shipped about 13.2 million of its Blackberry based phones in its first quarter. It also lowered its financial forecasts for the current second fiscal quarter. RIM will also be giving some of its employees layoff notices soon. The press release said that it will begin a "headcount reduction" in the current quarter. The company says that both this move and the release of new products in the next few months will generate more profits in the second half of its fiscal year.
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