We know that RIM has been working on the BlackBerry PlayBook for quite awhile but TechEye snagged an interesting historical rumor. According to one of their sources, a Marvell employee, RIM was working with Marvell for over six months before they ditched Marvell to go with Texas Instruments. As some of you know this was a huge change for RIM since they have been using Marvell chipsets in their GSM phones for years now.
It turns out that Marvell was having quite a bit of trouble getting their hardware to work with the QNX OS and software. According to this source:
“Marvell was having some serious problems getting the software to work with the hardware. The team was just taking too long and there were issues that weren’t being resolved quickly enough,”
This rumor fits in nicely with what we are hearing about Marvell lowering their projections as a major client targets entry level smartphones. It also somewhat jives with previous rumors that RIM was working on a Tablet model and then scrapped the plans to start afresh setting them about 6 months back. I will be really pissed if I learn that Marvell was the reason the BlackBerry PlayBook took awhile to launch.
via TechEye via IntoMobile
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