Strange bedfellows

Rico says the phrase refers to politics, but what is commerce but politics writ small? The New York Times has an article about the latest POS from Blackberry, in yet another imitation of the iPad from Apple:

Research In Motion challenged Apple by announcing that its BlackBerry PlayBook would be sold at the same price as the iPad 2. But the success or failure of the BlackBerry tablet, which will have a base price of $499, is unlikely to be determined in the aisles of Best Buy, Staples, RadioShack, or the other retailers that will begin offering it on 19 April. Many analysts believe that the PlayBook’s main customer base, like that of the original BlackBerry smartphone, will be corporations and government buying in bulk at a discounted price.
“Maybe ‘PlayBook’ is a misnomer,” said Tony Cripps, an analyst with Ovum, a unit of Datamonitor, who is based in London. “RIM would be crazy not to maximize its advantages in the enterprise market.”
The PlayBook will be the first tablet that is directly price-competitive with Apple’s offering. By comparison, both the Motorola Xoom and the Samsung Galaxy Tab cost more than the iPad 2. Hewlett-Packard, which is also expected to sell its TouchPad tablet to corporations, has not yet announced the price of its device.
While Best Buy began accepting advance orders for the PlayBook on its website on Tuesday, the primary buyers of the PlayBook are unlikely to be paying retail. From the first days of the BlackBerry hand-held, RIM carefully cultivated relationships with the information technology departments within corporations and governments. Its products have long included security and control features that are of more interest to people who run computer systems than to the employees using the BlackBerrys.
Jeff Orr, an analyst with ABI Research, said that RIM had been consulting with its large customers about the PlayBook for several months. “They’re playing to a market where they definitely have a closer relationship than Apple,” Mr. Orr said.
That has produced some initial corporate interest. Sun Life Financial, a large insurance and financial services company in Toronto, has agreed to buy about 1,000 PlayBooks and said that it had already developed an application for the devices.
But, beyond the identical prices, RIM and Apple have taken several different approaches to their tablets. The PlayBook, for example, has a 7-inch screen compared to the iPad 2’s 9.7-inch display. But unlike the iPad 2, the PlayBook can display web pages that use Adobe Flash software. and it has a much higher resolution camera for video and still photography.
At first, the PlayBook will be available only in a version that connects to the internet through wi-fi. RIM has said that more advanced, and costly, models for use on wireless carriers’ networks will be available from Sprint this summer. Following Apple’s lead, RIM. said that, in addition to the base model with 16 gigabytes of memory, the PlayBook will be offered as a 32-gigabyte version for $599 and a 64-gigabyte model for $699.
Despite the embrace of the iPad by consumers, the demand from businesses and governments for tablets remains, at best, unclear. “It’s still very, very early stages,” said Mike Abramsky, an equity analyst with RBC Capital Market, a unit of the Royal Bank of Canada, who said that small businesses currently accounted for most nonpersonal use of tablets. Still, Mr. Abramsky expects that sales to corporations and governments will account for about thirty to forty percent of all tablet sales by the end of 2012. Mr. Abramsky said that many corporations would probably prefer the PlayBook because of their history with the BlackBerry smartphone. But ,at the same time, he said he also expected that companies would find ways to integrate iPads and tablets based on Google’s Android operating system, if for no other reason than to accommodate employees who bring their personal devices to work.