Don't write off Research in Motion's BlackBerry PlayBook just yet. The first media tablets from RIM are flying off the shelves, according to retailer Best Buy.
"Best Buy has had great success selling BlackBerry smart phones in North America, so our sales expectations for the BlackBerry PlayBook were very high," Best Buy said in a statement sent to PCMag Friday.
"To date, we have far exceeded those expectations and we're finding that customers are even more interested in purchasing once they've tested the PlayBook in the store."
Without any figures to back up the statement, it remains to be seen whether Best Buy is engaging in some gamesmanship or perhaps coming to the aid of a key supplier which has been facing tough scrutiny of late.
Still, Best Buy's pronouncement is in line with a recent RBC Capital Markets report that an estimated 50,000 PlayBooks sold on the first day it was available beat first-day sales for both Motorola's Xoom and Samsung's Galaxy Tab.
A Jeffries equity analyst earlier put the figure of first-day PlayBook sales at 45,000.
The PlayBook runs RIM's own BlackBerry OS. The Xoom, Galaxy Tab and Acer Iconia A500 all run Google's Android mobile operating system, while the upcoming HP TouchPad will run the webOS operating system Hewlett-Packard gained with last year's $1.2-billion acquisition of Palm.
Those new and future tablets are seen as the main potential competitors for Apple's iPad and iPad 2 tablets, which currently dominate the burgeoning media tablet arena with as much as an 84 percent share of the market.