RIM extends its free Playbook offer

CANADIAN GADGET MAKER Research in Motion (RIM) has prolonged its free Playbook incentive to lure more developers.

At the beginning of the month RIM announced that it would give any developer who ported an Android app over to the Blackberry App World a free Playbook tablet.

The cut-off date for this offer was yesterday but RIM has now extended it to 2 March for app submissions. RIM said that it is due to "overwhelming interest" and has opened it up to Native C and C++, HTML5, Adobe Air, and Qt developers, too.

RIM said yesterday, "Today was going to be the deadline for the offer - but due to the overwhelming interest in the offer, we're extending it one more time."

"There have been over 1,500 app submissions as of last Friday and over 6,600 new developers registered in the BlackBerry App World storefront," it added.

The offer extension follows a sold out Developer Conference held by RIM in Amsterdam, which attracted more than 2,000 interested developers. The firm said it has teams working around the clock to cope with the high level of developer registrations and app submissions.

RIM's Playbook will be able to run ported Android apps via Runtime, which will come with the Playbook OS 2.0 this month. µ