RIM To Set Up Manufacturing Facility In India; Blackberry Playbook To Launch In April

Research In Motion, which manufactures and sells the BlackBerry range of handsets and the yet to be launched tablet PC Playbook, is learnt to be scouting around metros in India to establish a plant.

Over the past year, the Canadian company has been evading the Indian government's 'Big Brother' like attempts to gain access to encrypted data such as emails and instant messages being exchanged by Blackberry users. It appears this has not deterred the company from looking at investments in India.

RIM shipped 52.3 million handsets in 2010 globally and has over 4 lakh users in India.

Economic Times reports today that Bienfait is visiting Chennai, Mumbai and Delhi to identify a location for the handset manufacturing plant, which will be its first in the APAC region.

In related news, RIM announced that its tablet PC BlackBerry PlayBook, which runs on a 1 GHz dual-core processor and sports 1 GB of RAM, will be commercially available from April 19, 2011 in USA and Canada at a price of $499 (Rs 22,455). The 7-inch tablet PC runs on a proprietary OS by RIM and supports Android 2.3 apps and Java apps.

Mike Lazaridis, President and Co-CEO at Research In Motion said, "The upcoming addition of BlackBerry Java and Android apps for the BlackBerry PlayBook on BlackBerry App World will provide our users with an even greater choice of apps and will also showcase the versatility of the platform."

RIM plans to launch two app players so users can run the 25,000 BlackBerry Java apps and 200,000 Android apps that can be downloaded off the App World.