RIM on Thursday reported a "challenging" quarter that saw a relatively optimistic start for the BlackBerry PlayBook but a rapid decline for its phones. The company shipped 500,000 PlayBooks in its spring quarter, or twice as many tablets as Motorola did with the Xoom in its own most recent period. However, BlackBerry phone sales collapsed dramatically in the same period, falling from 14.9 million in winter to just 13.2 million in the spring.
