Canadian smartphone and tablet maker RIM has announced that the popular Angry Birds franchise is to head to the BlackBerry Playbook, making it the latest in a long line of mobile devices that will feature the destructive game. Speaking at BlackBerry World 2011, RIM co-CEO Mike Lazaridis confirmed today that Angry Birds for the PlayBook will be available on the QNX-powered tablet as of this summer, although a definite release date is still unknown....

Canadian smartphone vendor RIM has reportedly cut internal sales estimates for its BlackBerry PlayBook by more than half for its second quarter, from 2.4 million units to 900,000,reports Digitimes. The revision came after RIM announced it had sold 500,000 PlayBooks, which were sold from its mid-April launch until early June, but demand has continued to fall since its strong performance (50,000 units) on launch day. It is hoped that as RIM releases 3G, LTE and WiMAX models of its Blackberry PlayBook in the third quarter, demand will increase and sales will begin to increase as the company can fully ready its attack on market leader Apple....

Digitimes, the Chinese trade publication capable of drawing comments from every industry source close to the worlds largest smartphone manufacturers, is at it again suggesting that RIM will ship more than one million of its BlackBerry Playbook tablets in the first quarter of 2011. It suggests that shipments could mirror those of Motorola, when it launches its Xoom tablet. Reports suggest that the company has already placed800,000 ordersfor its Android 3....

If you’ve been having BlackBerry problems for the past few days, you’re far from alone. Canada-based Research In Motion has been having someserious server issuesand, in a conference call, has just explained how things have only gone from bad to worse in the past few days. In a conference call, RIM’s CTO for Software David Yach says that the outages (which started in South America and Europe but have now spread to the US as well) have caused a backlog of undelivered messages, but RIM doesn’t see any reason to believe that the problems are due to a hacking or other security breach....

As RIM’s BlackBerry servers and associated services begin to return to normal, company founder and co-CEO Mike Lazaridis has taken to the Canadian-based company’s YouTube channel to personally apologise for worldwide outages affecting customers, detailing exactly what happened for such a prominent service to be unavailable for so long. Echoing a written statement onBlackBerry’s Service Update page, Lazaridis explains that RIM didn’t meet its goal of providing “reliable, real-time communications around the world” adding that the company “did not deliver on that goal this week, not even close”....