The BlackBerry PlayBook took another price cut after the Kindle Fire's price was revealed to be $199. The new price can be seen not at the Best Buy website, indicating that the retailer wants to move their stock. The device is now priced at $299 for the 16GB version with the 32GB model at $399.99 and the 64GB costing $499.99.

Looks like tablet devices are taking price cuts as demonstrated by the whole HP Touchpad fiasco. With them seemingly abandoning webOS, they cut the $500 device down to $99. The retailers have been cutting down the price of the PlayBook for days before the unveiling of Amazon's new device.

RIM's device is also made by the same manufacturer of the Kindle Fire, Quanta. In fact, the Kindle Fire is just a trimmed down version of the BlackBerry PlayBook. The new Kindle has a slower processor and lower memory to make the $199 price.

Amazon compromised by equipping the Kindle Fire with support from their cloud services and Amazon servers for browsing using Amazon Silk. However, the PlayBook can outperform Kindle Fire in offline applications like executing apps and contents stored in the device's memory.

While being a more powerful device thatn the Kindle Fire, the PlayBook was derided for lacking features such as calendar and email apps if the customers didn't have a corresponding BlackBerry phone. This makes the device unable to stand alone like the iPad, Samsung Galaxy and the Kindle. This issue was going to be remedied by an upcoming update in October along with other problems.

Another weakness of the tablet is that it is unsubsudized like the Kindle. When a customer buys a Kindle Fire, they are not only a captured market for advertising in every Amazon services that comes with it but also an exclusive market for other services and goods. The PlayBook has none of that. What you buy is the hardware itself. It does not provide them with extra revenue from the customers using their products. The apps you can use in the PlayBook can be bought at the Android Market and not an app store operated by RIM. That is why they can't afford to sell their device to something close to Amazon's device.