Research in Motion said the software upgrade for its PlayBook tablet (BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0) has been delayed to February next year. "As much as we'd love to have it in your hands today, we've made the difficult decision to wait to launch BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0 until we are confident we have fully met the expectations of our developers, enterprise customers and end-users," the company said in a blog post on its website.

The tablet will ship without the Blackberry messenger (BBM) software, the company added. In the meantime, BlackBerry smartphone users will be able to continue to use BlackBerry Bridge to access BlackBerry Messenger on the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet's display.

Earlier this month, RIM had said it plans to introduce the BBX operating software for the BlackBerry smartphone and PlayBook tablet.

Blackberry is also now providing developers with the gold release of the native SDK for the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet as well as a beta of BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0 (launched last week at BlackBerry DevCon Americas). The developer beta allows developers to begin porting their native apps to the PlayBook platform. In the following months, the developer kit will be updated with the full Cascades animation and UI engine that was first demonstrated at BlackBerry DevCon. The company expects that the developer beta will generate thousands of new applications for BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0.