RIM is delaying the launch of its next Playbook OS till February. The announcement was given by RIM in a blog post yesterday. Earlier, this version of the Playbook OS was scheduled to launch sometime this month, coming shortly afte the company’s developer conference that was held last week in San Francisco. The maiden version of RIM’s PlayBook was launched in April, but hit the market with disappointing sales and not so good reviews.

“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.

We have decided to defer the inclusion of the BBM application to a subsequent BlackBerry PlayBook OS release. The software update will add advanced integrated e-mail, calendar and contact apps, a new video store, as well as new functionality that will allow your BlackBerry smartphone and BlackBerry PlayBook to work together even better,” RIM’s senior vice president for the PlayBook, David Smith, wrote in the blog post.

The company also said that its popular BBM feature won’t be included on the tablet until a later upgrade release.  Most RIM loyalists and industry analysts were eagerly expecting this launch, especially in light of the upcoming holiday season and the increasingly competitive tablet market.  But alas, RIM can’t seem to catch a break.  Whether RIM’s been busy maintaining its current network to avoid more outages, or the OS merely isn’t ready for prime time, it’s a dismal outlook for the phone maker.

It was just last week RIM suffered a humiliating service outage that outraged customers and shook investor’s faith.  The three-day service outage caused some businesses to lose money and because of this, even investors are not confident about RIM’s future.  After services were restored, RIM offered several free premium apps for subscribers, free tech support for enterprise subscribers and compensation for the service providers who took the first hit from angry BlackBerry users.

RIM’s got a long way to go if it hopes to still regain some market share in an era that’s long passed the days of CrackBerry addiction.  The trouble with creating an ecosystem around both devices and OS’s is timing and consumer support.  RIM may have missed the boat, and as Android and iOS continue to dominate the smartphone and tablet scene, RIM is left in the dark.