A sub-£300 BlackBerry PlayBook? Yes please!

I had to smile at reports of a sub $500 BlackBerry PlayBook from RIM. Right now, the exchange rate on that equates to £309 pounds — so if you assume the price is set to be around or just below that mark, RIM could possibly blow the tablet market wide open.

I would imagine that at this price we’d be talking about a slave version of the PlayBook that uses your BlackBerry handset for it’s connection. No trouble. There are hordes of executives out there with Blackberries ready to start screaming at their IT teams for one.

The price does need to be keen. Keen enough to solidly differentiate from the annoyingly expensive Android tablets and from the iPad. I suspect that’s why we have had a statement on price as we come into November. Assuming the PlayBook will actually hit consumer hands by early March, we still have four packed months to go for the rest to the tablet market to capitalise on RIM’s absence.

The corporate market is cracking wide open with executives now free to swap from their (comparatively) rubbish Pearls and four-year-old Qwerty BlackBerries to brand spanking new iPhone 4 and iPad devices. The PlayBook can’t come quick enough from where in standing.

And at less than £300? Well I will definitely be having one.