RIM says BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0 coming February 2012

BlackBerry PlayBook users have been waiting for a native email, contacts and calendar app to officially become available ever since the tablet was released in April. Originally it was supposed to arrive to the masses in the Summer, then delayed until October. Now RIM has posted a very lengthy note on their company blog that basically says the upcoming PlayBook OS 2.0 (which looks impressive), along with “email integration capabilities” will be delayed until February 2012. In addition, RIM said they’ve “decided to defer the inclusion of the BBM” in the PlayBook OS release until a later date – no reason was given but the rumours are that RIM is searching for a way to combine a single BBID on multiple devices. David J. Smith, SVP, BlackBerry PlayBook says they are “still working on it”. Here’s part of the message from RIM:

“As much as we’d love to have it in your hands today, we’ve made the difficult decision to wait to launch BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0 until we are confident we have fully met the expectations of our developers, enterprise customers and end-users. And here’s what we’re doing to accomplish that.

First off, we have decided to defer the inclusion of the BBM application to a subsequent BlackBerry PlayBook OS release. We are committed to developing a seamless BBM solution that fully delivers on the powerful, push based messaging capabilities recognized today by BlackBerry users around the world and we’re still working on it. In the meantime, BlackBerry smartphone users will be able to continue to use BlackBerry Bridge™ to securely access BlackBerry® Messenger™ on the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet’s high resolution display…

So when could an end user get the new update? We expect to deliver the new BlackBerry PlayBook OS to customers in February 2012 and we’ll continue to keep you updated as we progress to the launch.”

Source: BlackBerry