RIM vows to keep developing Flash for BlackBerry PlayBook – no joke

By Jeffrey Van Camp November 10, 2011

Since the Steve Jobs biography came out, we’ve heard a lot about his “reality distortion field,” or how he would make crazy things happen by getting everyone to believe it. RIM may have a reality distortion field of its own right now, but it’s not a good one. Despite Adobe vocally dropping support for Flash mobile and crowning HTML5 a victor over its own product, RIM is determined to keep developing Flash for its BlackBerry PlayBook.

“As an Adobe source code licensee, we will continue to work on and release our own implementations. RIM remains committed to delivering an uncompromised Web browsing experience to our customers, including native support for Adobe Flash Player on our BlackBerry PlayBook tablet (similar to a desktop PC browser), as well as HTML5 support on both our BlackBerry smartphone and PlayBook browsers,” RIM told AllThingsD. “In fact, we are pleased that Adobe will focus more efforts on the opportunities that HTML5 presents for our developers, and shares our commitment to HTML5 as we discussed together at DevCon Americas.”

While we don’t necessarily want RIM to just drop support for Flash out of nowhere, its commitment to continuing to spend its own money developing a product that Adobe itself is abandoning seems, well, somewhat odd. Also, RIM still has not delivered on any of the promises it made on the BlackBerry PlayBook when it launched in April. There is still no Android app support, no native email client, and no native calendar, among other things that were promised for Summer 2011. Many apps, like its podcasting app, remain somewhat useless as well. A new Staples app shows the PlayBook at a discounted $200 price point, but even at that price, we would probably recommend somebody pick up an Amazon Kindle Fire or Nook Tablet or a $300 tablet. The PlayBook’s app library just isn’t there and we’re beginning to doubt that things will get better for the struggling tablet. We love the intuitiveness of the BlackBerry Tablet OS, but RIM has a lot of issues to fix if it hopes to move forward.

What do you think? Do you have a PlayBook and love it? Should RIM dedicate its own resources to keeping a dying platform running on its dying tablet?

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Jeffrey Van Camp

Former Digital Trends Contributor

As DT's Deputy Editor, Jeff helps oversee editorial operations at Digital Trends. Previously, he ran the site's…

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