Research In Motion finally launched the 7-inch PlayBook tablet back in April last year after much delay since 2010. Though the tablet was aimed at the enterprise market, it shipped with none of the tools used in the field. It had no email support, no calendar, and no BlackBerry Messenger, unless tethered to a BlackBerry phone.

Globally, it was disappointing, having shipped only 850,000 units in three quarters and selling clearly much, much less. RIM shipped 500,000 PlayBooks in its first quarter of sales, dropping to 200,000 in the second, and then 150,000 in the last quarter of the year. Those are units shipped to retailers, not sold to consumers.

The company then put the PlayBooks through two fire sales, first at the end of last year when it halved the prices of each model, and then this month when it changed the prices to just $299 across all three models. It also failed to deliver 3G and WiMax versions of the device.

Despite those glaring failures, there are software developers who are still interested in creating applications for the PlayBook. At the BlackBerry developer conference in Singapore in early December, over a thousand attendees showed up and each one received a complimentary PlayBook.

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