At Least the PlayBook Exceeded Best Buy's Expectations…

Despite shortcomings that prompted less than glowing reviews, Research in Motion’s BlackBerry PlayBook is selling quite well–according to Best Buy, anyway. To hear tell from the retailer, RIM’s first tablet offering is flying off the shelves like fairies riding winged unicorns.

“Best Buy has had great success selling BlackBerry smart phones in North America, so our sales expectations for the BlackBerry PlayBook were very high,” the retailer said in a statement. “To date, we have far exceeded those expectations and we’re finding that customers are even more interested in purchasing once they’ve tested the PlayBook in the store.”

Best Buy didn’t quantify its expectations, nor did it provide any sales figures to illustrate the consumer demand that enabled them to be exceeded. Without any hard data to back up its claims we’re left to either take the retailer at its word, or not.

And despite the abundance of negative reviews that greeted the PlayBook at launch, there are reasons to accept that it sold well during its first week at Best Buy. Pre-orders from enterprise customers, for example, are believed to have been relatively strong, though there’s no telling how many enterprise customers pre-ordered their PlayBooks from Best Buy, rather than RIM.

In any event, Best Buy’s vote of confidence is good news for RIM which has been struggling lately with overwhelmingly negative market sentiment and kicks off its annual BlackBerry World conference this week.