You gotta hand it to the guys at RIM. After a terrible 2011, culminating in the removal of its chief executives, the company is still kicking. Like the Duracell bunny, the company keeps going and going and going.

Service outages, eroding market share, layoffs, plunging stock prices...the news has been nothing but bad for RIM. But the Canadian company, under the leadership of new president and CEO Thorsten Heins, isn't giving up.

RIM's latest strategy is to encourage the development of new apps for the BlackBerry platform. And just how will RIM woo developers? By bribing them.

Until February 13, every Android developer who ports an app to the BlackBerry's virtual Android environment, the Android App Player, will receive a 16GB BlackBerry PlayBook tablet.

The arrangement was announced in a tweet by RIM vice-president of developer relations Alec Saunders. To qualify, developers must submit their Android apps to RIM's App World before Valentine's Day.

Introduced in April 2011, the PlayBook has been one of RIM's disappointments, selling a few hundred thousand units compared to Apple's tens of millions. One barrier to the tablet's adoption has been the relative scarcity of applications – hence RIM's announcement.

The 16GB PlayBook is widely available online for $299 or less.

Web recommendation: Well. This is horrifying, cool, and I suppose promising. What a crazy future we appear to be headed toward. J.D. says check it out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. It snowed so hard in Serbia yesterday that someone has posted a YouTube video of himself snowboarding the streets of Belgrade, towed by a car. Darwinism in action or just another day in the Balkans? You be the judge.