BlackBerry PlayBook Experience Pop-Up Store Opens – Do You Care?

It is going to be a busy week for RIM. Today they address the company’s shareholders at its annual meeting and the company will also launch a pop-up shop for its PlayBook Tablet.  Wouldn’t you like to hear the feedback from its shareholders on this concept…

Previously, those applications could be accessed by using BlackBerry Bridge to pair the PlayBook to a BlackBerry Smartphone, which is nice, but shouldn’t be necessary to tackle standard tasks like email. The lack of native BBM support, even with the 2.0 update, is indicative of the PlayBook’s largest problems – it’s not a bad device, but not a particularly marketable one, either.

But, RIM will indeed keep trying to market the PlayBook, now with the BlackBerry PlayBook Experience being held at Chelsea Market in New York from July 10 to July 23. The event will be marked by daily themes, including culinary arts, travel, reading, music, and health and fitness. Through the two weeks, live bands and DJs will stop by, along with chefs and authors, to share their skills with the crowds as RIM attempts to showcase its year-old tablet.

It’s an awfully big party to throw for a device that, over a year, has been stigmatized as a dud. To put it roughly, once you get that stink of the perception of failure on you, it’s awfully hard to clean it off. The BlackBerry PlayBook Experience and the 2.0 update just don’t seem like they will be the tomato sauce bath to the skunk spray of the PlayBook’s disappointing first year on the market.