Sitting in on a panel today regarding the BlackBerry Runtime for Android App Player, we learned quite a bit about what's to come down the line for Android apps on the BlackBerry PlayBook. It definitely looks like there will be plenty of apps ported over from Android to play around with. One thing that was said was that the number one reason the BlackBerry PlayBook sales have been so poor is due to the lack of a native email client (the number two reason is lack of apps). While this isn't a secret, it's more obvious now that consumers are really after a solid tablet that can provide a native email experience with an app (not with Bridge). We still have no idea when we'll see the native PIM apps like email and calendar some to the PlayBook, but hopefully they aren't too far down the pipeline at this point. We did see RIM show off these native apps back at BlackBerry World this year (see video above) but they are still nowhere to be found. Just goes to show that RIM should have listened to us back at CES when we told them a tablet with no native email would never work :-)

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