Analyst ballparks the BlackBerry PlayBook price at $350

Boy, if we had a dime each time an analyst was wrong. We surely would like to believe John Jackson from CSS Insight, who estimates the PlayBook's price in a video interview for Bloomberg to be in the $300-$350 range.

The other point he made, is that due to the iPad's competition and the Android tablet assault, the PlayBook will have to keep a low profile price-wise to be successful. That certainly sounds good on paper, but considering the device has the highest-end components out of anything announced so far, we doubt that figure will be easily achievable without a subsidy of sorts.

If the PlayBooks are bought in batches of thousands for corporations and by the government, who use BlackBerry phones galore, then maybe that figure is correct, but for the individual customer - nah, we don't think so. It has more expensive components than the iPad, and RIM doesn't make its own hardware, so we really don't see this being priced lower than the iPad, unless the company is planning to make nothing on the PlayBook.

source: Bloomberg