It’s almost a month to the day that RIM’s PlayBook tablet went on sale and according to one analyst’s prediction, the company sold 250,000 so far.

[ad#Google Adsense 300×250 in story]RBC Capital Markets General Manager Mike Abramsky said in a note to clients on Wednesday that according to his channel checks, sales have been steady since the launch of the device. He also predicted that RIM would sell 500,000 PlayBooks during its first quarter on store shelves, according to BGR.com.

With those types of sales, RIM can expect to sell about 2.2 million PlayBooks in 2011, far below the expected 4 million units analysts previously predicted.

Why is this a fail? RIM’s co-CEOs have repeatedly said they believe the PlayBook was better than the iPad. Apparently they are the only ones that think so.

Let’s take a look at the first day the original iPad went on sale. Apple sold more than 300,000 iPads in one day. That’s one day. We don’t know how many iPad 2s the company sold on its first day, but in the last quarter Apple sold 4.69 million iPads.

If you extrapolate RIM’s sales, they would be about 750,000 for a three month period.

Yeah, RIM, you really have a winner on your hands with the PlayBook.

Interesting to note that Abramsky also projects BlackBerry shipments to decline 9 percent from last quarter to 13.5 million units.