RIM had been working under the hood on a tablet to compete with Apple, Google’s 3rd party Tablets.
RIM’s CEO announced the new tablet at keynote of BlackBerry Developer Conference on Monday. The new 7″ 1024 x 600 pixel widescreen device which they call as the “first professional tablet,” with BlackBerry enterprise integration and full web experience with HTML5 and Flash 10.1 compatibility.
Hardware Overview:
The PlayBook sports a 1GHz dual-core ARM Cortex A9-based processor with fair-enough 1GB of RAM, and GPU capable of running OpenGL code. The camera is good enough with front-facing camera rated at 3MP and rear at 5MP. The good part is that both of them can record HD video @ 1080p resolution.
On the connectivity side, it has robust 802.11n WiFi, Bluetooth, microUSB, and microHDMI with 3G connectivity as of today and 4G options planned sometime next year.
The device is fast but not as fast as android based Samsung Tab powered with single-core 1Ghz. Apart from that, device’s design is pretty much similar.
There’s no official word on Battery life, but RIM promises battery life would be good enough.
The Operating System
RIM’s new PlayBook is based on QNX multitasking OS called BlackBerry Tablet OS. On the good side, BlackBerry will offer a full POSIX-compatible native SDK for its tablet OS, as well as a JavaVM to run apps written for BlackBerry OS 6, just like Android’s Dalvik VM.
Web Performance had been priortiy for RIM and that’s why Full native API support is available via JavaScript, and leverages the same WebKit-based browser as BlackBerry OS 6 for HTML5 compatibility. Even Flash 10.1 is hardware accelerated. And thats why Flash and AIR-based apps will have their doors opened for developers on the PlayBook.
It is said that Cisco’s Android tablet woulds target similar Enterprise solutions with more media collaboration stressing of Video conferencing, VoIP and email.
Video Preview
Availability
Expected time-frame for PlayBook’s launch would be early 2011 but, Developers can sign up for access to cross-platform BlackBerry Tablet OS developer tools here, starting today.
Reelated: Cisco to Launch Android Tablet for Real-time Collaboration
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