Carphone Warehouse, Best Buy Cut Price of PlayBook to £250

PlayBook price plummets.

RIM's Blackberry PlayBook tablet hasn't exactly been a roaring success. Launched to tepid reviews earlier this year, the device obviously isn't flying off the shelves as quick as the company would like. Now it seems both Carphone Warehouse and Best Buy have cut the price in an effort to shift units. Crave reports that the tablet now costs £250 at both retailers, down from its previous starting price of £400. This new price represents savings of £150. Even better, this price cut is in place for all three models. The 16GB version now costs £250, while the 32GB costs £330 and the 64GB model costs £410.

Launched in April of this year, the PlayBook packs a 1GHz Cortex-A9 dual-core CPU, 1GB of RAM, a 7-inch 1024x600 display, a 5-megapixel camera capable of shooting 1080p HD video on the back, a 3-megapixel camera capable of 1080p HD video up front (for video calling and the like), support for Wi-Fi 802.11a/b/g/n, Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR, Micro-USB and Micro HDMI. It runs RIM’s new QNX-based BlackBerry Tablet OS but can also run existing BlackBerry Java apps as well as Android apps. Not bad, not bad at all.

The BlackBerry PlayBook is still on track to receive Android app compatibility thanks to its QNX-based operating system. This was originally intended for a summer update but has since been delayed by Research In Motion. RIM is also planning to bring this functionality to future BlackBerry phones running its next generation operating system, BBX.