On its opening day, RIM sold only 50,000 Playbook out of which 25,000 in pre-order and 20,000 in stores. The figures do not come even close to Apple’s performance of selling 300,000 devices on the opening day, but do far better than Android tablets, like Samsung’s Galaxy Tab and Motorola’s Xoom.

“While the launch of the Playbook is not attracting overnight crowds, pre-order sales and in-store demand in major cities has been solid; however, AT&T’s prohibition of free tethering is an unexpected negative,” Quoth analyst Peter Misek of Jeffries & Co.

An impediment is the fact that the Playbook lack access to email, content and calendar unless the buyer is a BlackBerry subscriber because he can tether it to his smart phone with BlackBerry Bridge software. But the BlackBerry Bridge software is not yet available on AT&T, which accounts for eight million of over 60 million BlackBerry subscribers.

“It’s going to be a tough sell to the consumer,” BGC Partner analyst Colin Gillis said of the tablet, a sleek but flawed gadget that doesn’t yet offer the secure email that is the trademark of RIM’s ubiquitous BlackBerry.

Playbook is RIM’s first entry to the tablet market and is expected to help take the company in a new direction. The Playbook has taken a step other proprietary tablet/OS owners are wary of, supporting the Android operating system by Playbook featuring Honeycomb apps.

A similar approach is taken by Hewlett Packards who are making their own tablets for their own operating system, WebOS and Microsoft is catching up with them. Either way, none of them is even close to the performances of the two giants, Apple and Android, that will still dominate the market in the following periods.

RIM’s first tablet features a 7-inch touchscreen, a dual-core processor, 1GB of RAM, 16GB of storage, high-definition cameras on its front and back, Wi-Fi, and an HDMI connector for output to big-screen TVs at the price of $499.

[image credit CNET]