BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins believes that the future of tablets are on borrowed time, giving the hardware platform five years to live. The comments, made in an interview yesterday, suggest that the company may not make a successor to the BlackBerry PlayBook, a tablet released in 2011 that failed to take off at retail.
Speaking to Bloomberg at the Milken Institute conference in Los Angeles, Heins claimed “In five years I don’t think there’ll be a reason to have a tablet anymore.” Heins suggested people may use a “big screen in your workspace, but not a tablet as such. Tablets themselves are not a good business model.”
Heins’ tablet commentary came at the same time as the CEO claimed the BlackBerry Q10 would sell “several tens of millions of units” to customers.