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RIM Announces BlackBerry PlayBook Tablet
siliconbits writes "Today, at the BlackBerry Developers Conference in San Francisco, company President and co-CEO Mike Lazaridis kicked off the event with the widely-anticipated news that RIM is developing a tablet PC of its own. Called the BlackBerry Playbook, the device is a 'Flash-loving,' 'device-paring,' 'enterprise ready' tablet, says RIM, with a 7-inch screen. It is 9.7 millimeters thick and features a 1024x600 widescreen display. It also supports 1080p through HDMI and has a USB port."
The tablet will run on a dual-core, 1GHz CPU and have 1GB RAM. Its browser will be WebKit-based, and the device will be running a brand new operating system developed by QNX software. The tablet won't have 3G access of its own when it launches, but will be able to tether to existing BlackBerry devices via Bluetooth.
Looks like all the handhelds are getting grown up OSes. I bet this really pisses off ballmer.
They're using WebKit (the leading mobile browser) since it's LGPL. They're also using QNX, which, while not exactly open source, was shared source. Key word: was. RIM (as in rim job) closed it up after buying QNX.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Hey RIM, pssst! There is nothing wrong with having the boring, but secure, reliable but quick, phone that just works. NOTHING.
You are being distracted into oblivion by people who WONT BUY YOUR TABLET ANYWAY.
Targeted at business users but called a playbook, eh? Seems like an odd name for that.
"I'm a Genius!"*
*Not an actual Genius
RIM is touting this as enterprise ready, but a lot of the features seems more geared towards a toy gadget (being able to play all sorts of video and audio formats, 1080p output, etc) and less as a business tool. I don't know of many companies that will willingly hand their employees (after already giving them a Blackberry phone) an add-on device that seems like it's geared to kill productivity.
My postings are informational and does not constitute legal advice. Act on it at your risk.
Other than the 7" screen, this thing not only meets but surpasses the iPad's specs.
Dual-core Cortex A9 processor: The A9, at the same clock speed, is 20-30% faster than the A8. This has two of them. We're looking at almost triple the iPad's processor power.
1GB of RAM vs 256MB
QNX-based multitasking OS - depending on how they dumbed it down, could be way beyond iPhone OS
1024x600 at 7" vs 1024x768 at 10" - I think the pixel density on the PlayBook is at least a bit higher.
It's been said that Apple ships so many devices that it's often able to buy up the entire production capacity for certain components for several months. It's possible that they've cornered the market on 9.7" touch screens and that that iPad has been successful enough that they continue to purchase the growing manufacturing capacity as it becomes available.
Companies want to ship now or as close to it as possible. If there won't be a sizable quantity of 9.7" screens until next spring it's not going to be possible to make a tablet using those dimensions. I haven't tried using a 7" tablet device, but the only difference is that the iPad has an extra 168 pixels, which may make a difference, but how much of one I can't say. It may also make the device somewhat less precise as there's a smaller physical area to register touches on, but that can be compensated for in software and Android has definitely been coming along quite well. How well the QNX works on the BlackBerry tablet is another matter, but it doesn't have to be a huge hurdle.
The processor and RAM are probably the most ambitious I've seen in terms of a tablet so far, but it may not be much better than what future Android tablets or the next generation iPad has by the time this device actually ships. Some of the specs are better than the current iPad, others aren't, and hardware specs aren't always the best indicator of devise usability of usefulness anyhow. The devise isn't even available yet, so it's somewhat useless to try to compare it to the iPad since no one has had extensive hands on with it yet.
One thing I seem to have missed is the price.
How much is this thing? $500?
It's just like that Android tablet by Samsung - why is there no announcement on price? Even subsidized prices if you must. Rumored pricing has it expensive, though.
And now this thing comes out with a ton of nice specs, but no pricing.
Heck, at least Jobs announced the iPad's price when he did the iPad keynote.
Triple core ARM setup with HD video playback
Symmetrical rectangular ABS plastic frame with shatterproof glass
- docking port/HDMI on the bottom
- USB3 on left and right
- evenly spaced screw beds around the sides for accessory bodies/attachments
- VESA plate for the back
PixelQi display (indoor/outdoor/e-ink)
Stylus or touch input
Front and rear 3 to 5MP cameras
- allow slack for the rear camera connection so the lens can be integrated into a larger body
Built in stereo mic
Built in stereo speakers
Mini PCI slot instead of built in 3G
GPS with compass
Accelerometers
Keep things squared off and let the consumer decide if they want to buy cheap silicone to round it off. That makes it easier for vendors to design bodies to add laser scanners or extended batteries or label printers or whatever.
You may have missed all the rumors about the next gen iPad being a 7 inch model. Apparently there is demand for that form size.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
Hey, all I want is a 9 inch (or higher pad) with the ipad's battery life, a USB port, and a non-locked down OS (preferrably linux, but I'll take a Windows variant); all the other specs I can live with.
Not to mention something that looks, feels and is as well-made as the iPad. The other day I messed with a few Android phones, and the newer ones appear to be a close match to the iPhone when it comes to quality of the screen, responsiveness, and usability. The illusion ends however when you pick one up and take a closer look... most have a cheap plasticy feel, often with too many buttons in all the wrong places.
I love my iPhone but if someone decides to make an Android phone with a focus on quality rather than cutting corners, I'll be all over it. Same with tablets, really...
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
You must have never used a tablet for any serious amount of time...
If the bezel on the iPad was any smaller, it would border on useless due to inadvertent touches. The wide bezels gives you an area to actually grab/hold the tablet. Otherwise, you're touching the touch screen and all hell breaks loose. It's not always feasible to cradle or rest the tablet on a surface. (E.g., reading in bed)
While a narrower bezel would look "cooler", it has no basis in reality. Some concepts remain concepts for a reason.
You mean while they charge you $39.99 for tethering?
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Dude. They're still pumping out Bold and Curve revisions that are nothing but spec bumps + the trackpad. All this other crap? It's on the side.
I know a looot of people who work at RIM. They all know that they have to keep the enterprise market locked down. But that's mostly to do with the BES. Hardware wise, they've already long surpassed what "enterprise" needs. To keep growing, they NEED to grab some part of the consumer market. All that RIM growth the last couple years? That's just been them leveraging the hell out of BBM and selling them to college students. That's not going to last at this rate if their hardware doesn't keep up.
The OS is built on the QNX Neutrino architecture
Interacting with the thing is going to be just about impossible. All we need now is for the marketing guys to describe it as a "quantum leap" and their utter failure to understand the physics terms they are using will be complete...particularly ironic given that the owner of RIM financed the creation of the Perimeter Institute for theoretical physics in Canada!
7 inches should be enough for anybody.
Their they're doing there hair.
Really. QNX is many, many years BEHIND Linux right now.
Yeah, they have a microkernel with hard-realtime support and good maximum latency (which Linux can't match just yet).
However, if you look closely - it's not so great. Unix subsytem, filesystem and network stack all run inside one big process. So if it crashes it's almost as bad as kernel crash in Linux.
QNX's support for massive SMP (more than 8-16 CPUs) is bad, its scheduler is not quite good enough.
Various elements of QNX stack are hindered by microkernel approach as well. For example, you can forget about things like receive packet steering ( http://lwn.net/Articles/362339/ ).
QNX's support for 'transparent distributed processing' is just a joke. It's not usable in practice at all, because of overhead of message passing (which is usually assumed by applications to be extremely cheap).