Blackberry is the latest entrant to the tablet PC segment with its new Blackberry Playbook, its answer to the hugely successful Apple iPad. Coming from a company, which is the leader in the business segment of smartphones, this tablet does not forget its roots. It is probably one of the most business oriented tablets to be introduced. This is also easily the most exciting device that Blackberry has made in recent years and it is easy to see why.
The tablet sports a 7 inch touch screen display, which is capacitive and hence offers multi-touch recognition. The screen also sports a resolution of 1024 600 resolution, which is same as the unofficial industry norms nowadays. Blackberry has opted in for the new QNX operating system in favour of the Blackberry’s OS 6 and the results are evident. The Playbook is more business oriented than others, but it does not sacrifice the entertainment side of it though. The operating system looks like a combination of Blackberry OS and WebOS and this operating system allows users to multi-task.
The tablet sports a 1GHZ dual-core processor, one of the first for a tablet, and a 1GB of RAM, making it the fastest tablet to be ever made. This makes the tablet operations very smooth, irrespective of the content, whether it a 1080p high definition video, or a high-end game, or a complex business application. The tablet supports a wide range of video formats like MPEG-4, H.264 and WMV. The tablet also has HTML5 support for smooth surfing of the web.
The tablet has two cameras, a 5-megapixel and 3-megapixel, one on either side. The 5-megapixel camera can be used for taking crisp and sharp images, while the front facing 3-megapixel camera is used for video conferencing, features that are not seen on the Apple iPad yet. The tablet supports Adobe Flash player 10.1 and hence surfing the web on this tablet is just the same as it surfing on your PC. There is also Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 2.1 connectivity, but 3G option is missing. The tablet more than makes up for it with HDMI and USB ports, which more than makes up for the lack of it.
Blackberry Playbook is being offered in two different memory versions, 16GB and 32GB. Because of its smaller size it is much lighter at just 0.9lbs, which is nearly half the weight of the Apple iPad. Being a Blackberry, allows the tablet to be synchronized with your Blackberry phone through Bluetooth tethering and hence all your phone content can be made to be displayed on your tablet too.
Prices have not been revealed yet, although one can expect prices to be very competitive given the enormous competition that is growing in the tablet PC segment. The device is expected to launch in early 2011 and RIM also plans to open a new app store, which would cater to the Blackberry Playbook just as Apple’s app store does. The PlayBook should offer BlackBerry a permanent footing in the touchscreen tablet market as it is one of the most compelling devices announced yet.