Canada-based Research in Motion (RIM) has extended its business focus from smartphones to mobile PCs and solutions through offering tablet PCs and much more application programs, according to company vice president Tyler Lessard for Global Alliances and Developer Relations speaking at the BlackBerry Developer Conference Asia taking place in Bali, Indonesia, during January 13-14.

RIM will launch PlayBook, its first tablet PC running on BlackBerry Tablet OS based on QNX Neutrino. In line with the launch, RIM will offer the BlackBerry 6.1 Application Platform, the latest version of BlackBerry WebWorks software development kit supporting BlackBerry Tablet OS and BlackBerry OS.

BlackBerry App World, RIM's online app store launched in April 2009, currently has 18,000 applications available for download as well as more than 35 million users with an average daily download volume of two million and more than 300,000 registered developers around the world.