The much-anticipated PlayBook tablet from Research in Motion (NASDAQ: RIMM) is scheduled to hit the shelves soon, and RIM aims to sell 1 million of them by the end of March. Also debuting this spring is the iPad 2, which has led some to question the odds of PlayBook's success in an increasingly crowded tablet market.

Even though the Playbook is designed with superior security features, it may have a hard time rivaling the iPad in enterprises, predicts Forrester Research analyst Ted Schadler. Because the Playbook (and rivals like the Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) Cius and HP (NYSE: HPQ) Slate) is being sold via business accounts, its adoption rate is likely to be slower than the iPad's, which is driven primarily by consumer demand. 

The iPad has additional advantages, writes eWeek's Clint Boulton, in that it "has a more than one-year head-start on most tablets and is prepping for an iPad 2 launch this spring, making it extra challenging for the non-iPad tablets to gain traction in businesses that have grown to trust the iPad."

CIO magazine's Al Sacco has an even more dire prediction for the PlayBook. Although he is impressed with the device's hardware and operating system, he warns that he has discovered a major flaw: If you use the PlayBook with customized business applications but you aren't linked to a corporate VPN via WiFi, Sacco writes, you won't have a secure connection back to RIM's BlackBerry Enterprise Server Mobile Data Service. So, even though you could download data from business apps securely, you couldn't transmit data back to your business systems. To do so, you would have to send the data via a BlackBerry smartphone. "[T]he initial version of the PlayBook tablet will be nothing more than a 7-inch display for viewing data, unless you have access to a Wi-Fi network and VPN," he writes. 

The PlayBook has garnered many fans, however, among those who have had a chance to see it in action. In an extensive review posted at GigaOm, Paul Miller calls the tablet "surprisingly polished and responsive." Miller has good things to say about the screen, pixel density and touch responsiveness. "Overall the device is blazingly fast, comfortable to hold, and intuitive to use," he writes.

For more:
- see Clint Boulton's post at eWeek
- see Al Sacco's post at CIO
- see Paul Miller's post at GigaOm

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