[raganwald]

When you announce a new product; have it ready to ship within in the month (sic)

In martial arts they have this thing they call "telegraphing" a blow, where you unwittingly give your opponent plenty of notice of what's coming so that they can be ready to counter it.

Obviously RIM is so confident of their manufacturing and marketing prowess that they don't mind giving Apple 3-6 months notice of what they plan to ship.

On another subject, why is RIM even in this business? Are Apple iPads taking market share away from Blackberrys? Is iPad some kind of a threat to RIM? I would have guessed that RIM would be pouring all of its efforts into defending its corporate phone turf, not thinning their forces by launching new devices.

[varaon]

RIM is also leveraging their QNX acquisition for the OS here, so it seems like its a primary part of their game plan, and not a spin-off product.

[seanm]

Agreed. I think this is a way to make some money and work out the kinks of QNX-as-a-phone-OS.

Also, if this thing was 3G in addition to wifi, a lot of people would ditch their BBs in favour a PlayBook. As it is, I can't see this generation being a big hit. Kind of hope it is though.

[YooLi]

"Obviously RIM is so confident of their manufacturing and marketing prowess that they don't mind giving Apple 3-6 months notice of what they plan to ship."

Really? To me it reeks of "don't forget about us". They are telegraphing not because they are so confident in their punch but because they don't want people to forget they are in the fight.

[raganwald]

I apologise for being a little sarcastic. However, "Don't forget about us" is only useful if their customers, especially their "enterprise" customers, are about to standardize on iPads and can be persuaded to hold off on the basis of PR stunt.

It's not obvious to me that consumers interested in buying an iPad for back-to-school or during the holiday season will hold up their purchases to see what RIM actually ships and how much it costs.

[wvenable]

RIM really has nothing to lose -- they're not going to get this tablet out in time for Christmas 2010 so they might as well announce it now. They have little to gain in saying nothing until they launch because they're going to launch too late.

[raganwald]

When you put it like that, maybe we're missing the obvious. Maybe this isn't aimed at Apple, maybe it's aimed at HP.

[guywithabike]

That's the thing, though. They're not in the fight. They're still in the locker room putting their socks on.

[wvenable]

> On another subject, why is RIM even in this business?

Because these modern tablets are not scaled down PC's, they are scaled up phones.

[cubicle67]

That's how it appears, but I think it's a misleading view

I think this is where we're going to see companies OS decisions come into play in the next few years; iOS is (very loosely) a subset of OSX, but with a phone UI. There's loads of potential here for it to grow. I don't know much about Android, but I think it's similar.