Blackberry Playbook

The makers of all things Blackberry, Research in Motion Ltd, will roll out the "Blackberry PlayBook" tablet computer next year so we will all have to just wait until then. The Blackberry Playbook will be launched in North America in the first quarter of 20100, with a global launch scheduled for the second quarter of 2011.

There seems to a lot of demand for tablets with quite a bit of interest from worldwide retailers in the Playbook. Incidentally, Blackberry seem confident that in the coming quarters they can surpass the sals volume levels achieved by Apple. Fighting talk from Blackberry - we will have to see whether they can really do this.

RIM are been shy about what carrier they will use and the exact price and have only said that the Blackberry Playbook will sell for under $500.

The Blackberry PlayBook is a 7-inch tablet computer that will run on a new operating system built by QNX Software Systems, a Research in Motion unit that makes software used to run everything from cars to nuclear reactors.

The device will have a 1 gigahertz dual-core processor with front and rear facing cameras and a video conferencing facility. It seems that RIM have looked at what the Apple iPad does not do and introduced it to the Playbook. The Playbook supports Adobe Flash technology so will load flash websites that the iPad fails to load. It will also have the ability to multi task which is something that a lot of Apple iPad users have complained about the lack of this with the iPad. However, whether this is will be true multi tasking or the applications just sit inactive in the background like on their phones, remains to be seen. But with 1 GHZ processing power, the potential for multi tasking looks promising. According to RIM, the Playbook will also be good for videogames too.

Competition in the tablet pc market is becoming much fiercer and RM is seeking to grab a piece of the fast-growing and competitive tablet market. Samsung Electronics recently announced that it intends to sell more than one million of its Galaxy Tab tablet computers by the end of the year and is looking to launch other sizes. Apple has so far sold more than seven million iPad units but RIM are confident they can surpass that with the Blackberry Playbook

To throw even more into the tablet pc mix, Amazon have said they will create a Kindle e-book-reader application for the PlayBook. Interesting!

The Playbook is much smaller than the Apple iPad with a 7 inch screen compared to the 9.7 inch screen of the iPad. When you see the Blackberry company co founder Mike Lazaridis using it at Adobe Max, he seems to be peering at the screen a bit. His fingers looked a bit stubby for the screen too. I can see that if you have very big fingers you may find the screen fiddly, but without seeing the Playbook in the flesh, one can't be sure.

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