RIM Significantly Delays the Only Product That Has a Chance of Keeping It Alive

Despite an awful third-quarter earnings report and placement on a death watchlist, somehow things are still managing to get worse for the sinking Waterloo tech company.

RIM says that the hardware needed to support its BlackBerry 10 devices won't be out until the "latter part" of 2012—which means there won't be any new BlackBerrys for quite a long time, despite the fact that the current OS 7 devices were only supposed to be a temporary gap-filler as RIM transitioned into its "superphones" (the ones once named BBX before RIM got sued in yet another lost battle). RIM originally said BBX superphones would launch "early 2012," with most educated guesses suggesting a February launch.

Already this was considered slow; RIM would miss the holiday season and competing flagship devices like the iPhone 4S and Samsung Galaxy Nexus would have already been released. Then again, this is coming from a company that pioneered mobile email yet launched a PlayBook tablet without native email—and that has continually delayed the release of an OS update with it. PlayBook consumers will still be waiting until at least February to get some very basic native features on their BlackBerry tablets, even though the product was launched in the spring.

Mike Lazaridis said that BlackBerry 100 will "need a highly integrated dual-core LTE platform" but that "this chip set will not be available until mid-2012." Then Mike told an awful joke: "in the meantime, we believe our strong BlackBerry 7 portfolio will continue to drive adoption around the world.”

Well, we know the PlayBook won't drive adoption, even at 60% off.