Despite successfully putting to bed rumours suggesting the firm had plans to discontinue its PlayBook tablet, all remains far from rosy in the RIM camp.

Indeed, the first major update for the platform's OS - announced during RIM's recent developer conference - has had to be delayed until 2012, with a statement from the firm claiming BBM smartphone compatibility issues are behind the slip.

BBM AWOL

"We have decided to defer the inclusion of the BBM application to a subsequent BlackBerry PlayBook OS release," said SVP David J. Smith, revealing said update will now launch in February.

"We are committed to developing a seamless BBM solution that fully delivers on the powerful, push based messaging capabilities recognised today by BlackBerry users around the world and we're still working on it."

Once the big kinks have been ironed out, the update will enter a beta testing phase in order to test any remaining issues.

"Shortly we will also be starting a series of closed betas of BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0 with select enterprise customers from our Early Adopter Program (EAP)," added Smith.

"These betas will be rolled out over the course of this year and are an important next step to bringing our unmatched enterprise app deployment, device manageability, security and email integration capabilities to the tablet category."

[source: RIM]