RIM: 90% of BlackBerry PlayBook Users Upgrade to Latest OS Within One Month

Last week, we reported that nearly half of all BlackBerry PlayBook users had already upgraded to RIM’s much-anticipated OS 2.0—just one week after its release. At the time, advertising analytics firm Chitika forecasted an upgrade penetration level of up to 75% within three weeks post-release.

This seemed an aggressive prediction, but it may have actually been conservative. Because now RIM itself has unveiled a statistic in this vein: “90% of all PlayBook users upgrade to the latest operating system version within one month of its release.” That’s truly remarkable, especially when compared with Google’s Android platform, which is so horribly fragmented that just 1% of users run its latest operating system.

What’s not clear is the “why?” of things. Typically, there are always a fair amount lazy, forgetful, or clueless device owners who are terribly slow to upgrade, even for major releases. RIM, it seems, is claiming that absolutely any upgrade experiences this penetration, even the minor bug fixes—or so it sounds by the company’s wording.

So are PlayBook users simply more savvy, more engaged? Or would Android users be this quick to the draw, too, if it were made as easy? Or, perhaps, have PlayBook users just been so hungry for the delayed improvements that they eargerly downloaded all new updates? Either way, it’s one of RIM’s new lures for developers, and it’s certainly something to consider.