In a bold statement for a company which is still on rather shakey ground, BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins said in an interview at the Milken Institute conference in LA that he does not see a future for tablets.

“In five years I don’t think there’ll be a reason to have a tablet anymore. Maybe a big screen in your workspace, but not a tablet as such,” he said. “Tablets themselves are not a good business model.

In a separate interview with Bloomberg TV, asked about BlackBerrys future tablet plans, Heins outlined his concerns about the market but said there are announcements on that way, adding his vision that a BlackBerry smartphone should be all anyone needs. “The tablet market is very challenging from a pure hardware perspective; very few companies make money on the hardware.”

“If we want to do it, we need a service value proposition on top of that. Some of that will be shown at Blackberry Live but we are running with a very different concept that makes this [the Q10] and only this your personal mobile computing power.” He said there will be more exciting announcements to come this year.

Will Hollywood go BackBerry?

The CEO said he was pleased with initial sales of the BlackBerry Q10 in the UK, which became the fastest selling tech product ever for its exclusive launch partner, Selfridges. Feedback from early adopters centred on peoples love for the Qwerty keyboard. “We will turn Hollywood BlackBerry again,” Heins claimed was feedback from a celebrity trialling the device. It is now available with most of the major operators in the UK and the CEO said he expects the Q10 to sells 10s of millions of units worldwide.

Heins again refuted claims from Boston-based wealth management firm Detwiler and Fenton that the earlier released, and Qwerty-less, Z10 is seeing a growing number of returns. He said the device was doing better than earlier BlackBerry models and is in-line with industry figures on device returns.

Asked if he believed this was a gross misrepresentation or wilful manipulation by short sellers, he said: “Whatever the motive is… you have to use the right facts.” The case is with US regulators.