Hasta La Gadget!

RIM’s iPad competitor hasn’t even made its way into the hands of reviewers yet and it’s already starting to get poor marks. According to those familiar old unnamed sources, the business-minded tablet has a battery that only lasts “a few hours,” far shorter than that of its chief rival, Apple’s iPad (Samsung’s Galaxy Tab, meanwhile, claims six).

Research in Motion, the sources continue, had to push the product back to 2011 from a planned September 2010 release, due to the aforementioned issues. RIM, for its part, is firmly denying the battery problems, chalking any reported issue up to incomplete versions of the hardware.

Says the company, “Any testing or observation of battery life to date by anyone outside of RIM would have been performed using pre-beta units that were built without power management implemented.”

Expectations aren’t particularly high for the forthcoming device, with most analysts predicting that the Playbook will sell a fraction of what Apple moved in the iPad’s first year.