RIM trims PlayBook line-up with 16GB version purge

Research In Motion has stopped making the cheapest version of its PlayBook tablet, a less successful rival to the iPad and to Android tablets.

RIM has said it will no longer produce the 16GB version of its BlackBerry PlayBook tablet. Image credit: Ben Woods

At the moment, the 16GB PlayBook costs less than £200 on Amazon UK. That price — low for a tablet carrying a well-known brand — is the result of massive price cuts that RIM instituted last November, in a bid to revive the poorly-selling tablet.

However, IDC figures for the fourth quarter of last year showed the PlayBook as having less than one-percent share of the global tablet market.

The PlayBook app store is still much less populated than those for the iPad and Android, despite a recent push by RIM to spruce the device up with a major operating system update.