The New Blackberry Playbook Tablet
/The New Blackberry Playbook
First Published Date : October 17, 2010 ADawnJournal.com
The tablet wars are on across North America thanks to the revolutionary iPad, which has started the tablet market with such a force that many were caught off-guard by its success. To that end, Blackberry does not want to be left out of the tablet wars and have announced the introduction of their Blackberry Playbook, a small tablet computer they hope will compete with Apple iPad.
The PlayBook is 9.7 mm thick, making it the smallest tablet computer ever made, and the first below 10 mm in thickness. The company is expecting to deliver the product to its developers and enterprise customers by October, with it being widely released by early 2011.
Prior to the release of the product, there was a great deal of speculation about the tablet, nicknamed the BlackPad.
So, what can you expect from the PlayBook when it is widely released in 2011 to all of us? Here are just a few things:
1. It will have a seven inch screen, which will allow a resolution of 1024 x 600, which will support the multi-touch operation and gesture system with a form factor of 5.1 inches by 7.6 inches by .4 inches, giving it a total weight of just under one pound.
2. Two high-definition cameras that will be mounted on the front and back will support the video , giving it something the iPad does not have (although the next iPad model is expected to have cameras). The Playbook cameras will be three megapixels and five megapixels and a micro-HDMI socket will provide the ability for digital-video output and the screen will have a HDMI interface so it can show different images simultaneously.
3. As with the iPad, which has the AppStore, the PlayBook will have the ability to use Blackberry smartphone applications, which will be provided by the BlackBerry WebWorks toolkit, which will allow applications to be written on both the smartphone software (BlackBerry OS 6) and the tablet software (BlackBerry Tablet OS).
4. In addition, the tablet will also have a web browser that supports Adobe Flash, which the iPad does not, and HTML5.
While the first version of the PlayBook will have no telephone capabilities, relying instead on Bluetooth communication, future versions of the PlayBook will have the capability to make telephone calls.
So, when will it be released in the United States and elsewhere? Well, as we already said, it will be released in the United States in early 2011, but elsewhere it will be released in the second quarter, which means between April and June 2011.
Will the PlayBook take a bite out of the market that the iPad currently dominates? Tough to say since Blackberry is a phone company, not a computer company. However, many thought the same about Apple selling cell phones but they effectively changed what people by with the iPhone. So, only time will tell to see if the PlayBook will be the Apple killer, or if it will be itself, killed by Apple.
