“RIM set out to engineer the best professional-grade tablet in the industry with cutting-edge hardware features and one of the world's most robust and flexible operating systems. The BlackBerry PlayBook solidly hits the mark with industry leading power, true multitasking, compromised web browsing and high performance multimedia.” - Mike Lazaridis, President and Co-CEO at Research In Motion.Fondly referred by many as the “BlackPad” before its launch, the 7-inch capacitive touch screen device with WSVGA 1024x600 resolution is powered by a 1GHz dual-core processor together with a 1GB RAM. It comes with two HD cameras – 3 megapixels front facing and 5 megapixels rear facing – and supports both 1080p HD video recording and playback. As far as connectivity goes, it is equipped with 802.11 a/b/g/n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR, while physically, there are also microHDMI and microUSB ports.
As for the new BlackBerry Tablet OS, RIM stated that it is fully POSIX compliant and supports OpenGL for 2D and 3D graphics application such as gaming. The OS also fully support Adobe Flash Player 10.1, Adobe Mobile AIR, HTML5 and Java, making it pretty web friendly as well as attractive to developers and content creators. Well, that's pretty much about it for now as RIM is going to keep the rest of the features and specifications until further notice.
To be available in 3G and 4G models, the device is expected to be out in US in early 2011 while the rest of the world will start to receive it sometime in Q2 of 2011. Check out two more product shots after the jump and to find out more, head on to www.blackberry.com/playbook.
