Adobe AIR Development

[thesmileman]

More bad news for RIM and RIM devs.

http://blogs.wsj.com/marketbeat/2011/08/12/research-in-motion-sprint-says-no-thanks-to-playbook/

[peter9477]

As I understand it, from reading about two dozen articles on this, it sounds like Sprint has a WiMAX network, which hasn't gained much traction and it seems like they're abandoning it now in favour of LTE, a much more popular 4G network. Announcing that they're "abandoning the 4G PlayBook" seems like a bit of a smokescreen if what they're really doing is abandoning WiMAX.

RIM immediately announced that they're are also focusing on an LTE version as the 4G model, so this doesn't look like it's a particular big deal to me. I even get the impression that people think this explains why the 4G model was not released this summer: possibly not delays on RIM's part so much as Sprint rethinking their overall strategy.

[virtualscribe]

This isn't about Blackberry or PlayBook. Sprint will make more money selling iPhone and IOS solutions.

So its a directive from the top; get rid of competition to milk more from Apple's hardware when its introduced in the Fall.

I just went through this deception/inception this week, with the HP TouchPad. The old guy CEO Mark Hurd's project died when he left because of under the table antics with a contractor. New guy CEO Leo Apothekar quickly disposed of the old project to accomodate his background in enterprise. All the work of all these people thrown away, because theres more money in a future pivot. 

If Apple is introduced to Sprint this Fall, their US market share far outweighs current smartphone/tablet than Blackberry. I'm still trying to recover from the shock of a very promising development environment in HP WebOS; I hope this doesnt derail PlayBook development the same way.