Research In Motion is reportedly slowing production of its BlackBerry PlayBook tablet after reporting lower than anticipated sales. It had expected to ship between 400 and 600,000 units during its last fiscal quarter but only shipped 200,000. Some 1.5 million PlayBooks have been manufactured so far and cumulative shipments have only reached about 700,000 units, suggesting that RIM still has some 800,000 devices sitting in inventory.
Digitimes today reported that RIM has cut back on orders, triggering the layoff of about 1,000 workers at one of Quanta Computer’s Taiwan factories. With monthly shipments dropping to about 100,000 units in the third quarter, Quanta made the move to minimize its losses.
QNX, the operating system behind the PlayBook, is expected to make the leap onto RIM’s BlackBerry smartphones in early 2012. RIM will show off a prototype QNX-powered smartphone next month at BlackBerry DevCon.