There were rumors going around last week that Research in Motion will soon be unveiling a 4G LTE PlayBook.  IT was reported that they were getting ready to unveil the 4G tablet as early as July 31 but the Canadian company didn’t announce anything until today.

According to RIM, the 4G LTE PlayBook will be available in Canada, first, on August 9.  The 4G PlayBook features a 1.5GHz dual-core processor.  The new PlayBook will launch on Rogers, Bell and Telus — Canada’s three largest carriers.

Aside from the 4G LTE PlayBook announcement, RIM, during an interview with the Telegraph, CEO Thorsten Heins said that they would open sourcing BlackBerry 10.

“We don’t have the economy of scale to compete against the guys who crank out 60 handsets a year. We have to differentiate and have a focused platform. To deliver BB10 we may need to look at licensing it to someone who can do this at a way better cost proposition than I can do it. There’s different options we could do that we’re currently uinvestigating.”

In admitting that they cannot compete with other brands who are able to produce tons of new products in a single year, they stated that there’s room in OEM’s lineup for a BB10 device.

“You could think about us building a reference system, and then basically licensing that reference design, have others build the hardware around it – either it’s a BlackBerry or it’s something else being built on the BlackBerry platform. We’re investigating this and it’s way too early to get into any details. We have to also model this from a finance perspective – that’s why we’re working with the financial advisers to see if we do this where would it take the company. Either we do it ourselves or we do it with a partner. But we will not abandon the subscriber base,” Heins added.

The question now is, will OEMs be interested in using BB10?  Android is already dominating the open market with Microsoft hot on its heels–do we really need another open source platform?  And let’s face it, RIM has been worse than Google in rolling out updates or new versions of their platform, so I’m not really sure if open sourcing is the best route for them.  The strategy didn’t seem to work for HP either.  Then again, maybe an open source BB platform is what RIM needs in order to recover.