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.

Comments

They keep designing for yesterday....

[LibertineR]

Why? We dont need this. We need a Storm 3 that WORKS! Why is RIM ignoring the market that made them successful? Let Apple have the consumers, let Droid have the geeks. Business needs a phone that just works, dammit. Oooh, a tablet. I can read my email with larger fonts? WTF?!?!?

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.

"Play"book

[Teese]

Targeted at business users but called a playbook, eh? Seems like an odd name for that.

Re:"Play"book

[Anonymous Coward]

Not really. It panders to business speak ... "oh, we'll take a page from their playbook" - eg: referring to strategy, not a gaming platform.

I know a bunch of alpha salespeople / marketers that are gonna love this thing, even if it is crap.

Re:"Play"book

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Not really. It panders to business speak ... "oh, we'll take a page from their playbook" - eg: referring to strategy, not a gaming platform.

I know a bunch of alpha salespeople / marketers that are gonna love this thing, even if it is crap.

RIM should create a phone called the "New Paradigm". I wish I could say I'm aiming for a 'funny' here but I used to work at a place where 'Buzzword Bingo' was a way us engineering-peons really passed the time during meetings.

Enterprise Ready

[Sonny Yatsen]

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.

Re:hmm

[the linux geek]

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.

Re:hmm... 7 inches

[Kozar_The_Malignant]

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.