PlayBook Employee Discount Fuels Fire Sale Rumors

The news comes on the heels of other reductions in the PlayBook's price. Some stores, such as Staples, offered the PlayBook tablet for $200 as part of their Black Friday promotions, and Best Buy is selling refurbished models for as little as $150 and canceling orders for new PlayBooks, according to recent reports.

RIM has shown no evidence towards plans to make the special employee pricing on the PlayBook available to the general public, but some speculate it may follow in Hewlett Packard's fire sale footsteps, which also cut prices on its TouchPad tablet for employees before offering the device to the general public at a low rate.

In August, buyers snatched up HP's TouchPad at prices as low as $100 after the company pulled support for the tablet and decided to unload its inventory. The TouchPad got an unexpected second lease on life as a result, selling out quickly and generating renewed consumer interest in the device.

The PlayBook, which normally starts at $500, suffered from lower-than-expected sales in a year that has been tough overall for RIM. A worldwide BlackBerry outage in October followed months filled with layoffs, executive departures and declining sales, all of which culminated in RIM trading below book value for the first time in nine years and losing the faith of its investors.

Now with competing tablets such as Apple's iPad and Amazon's Kindle Fire gaining momentum with strong Black Friday sales, the PlayBook may find itself falling even further behind.

By unloading a few PlayBooks to employees at a rock-bottom price, RIM may hope to reduce its inventory and perhaps give employee morale a needed boost. However, it may also be testing the waters to see if a fire sale on the device may boost its flagging sales and reputation.