BlackBerry’s Tablet Playbook

Yesterday at DevCon 2010, Research in Motion (RIM) revealed a new “business-ready” 7-inch touch screen BlackBerry tablet referred to as the PlayBook. Is this a significant business competitor to Apple’s iPad?

The PlayBook is fascinating. First, RIM have loaded a lot of ability into a small shell.

• A 7-inch 1024 x 600 pixel touch screen, which is much smaller sized than the iPad’s 9.7-inch screen, might be more suitable to the BlackBerry-wielding suit.
• Inside there’s a 1GHz dual-core processor chip and 1GB of Ram memory.
• There’s a 3 mega-pixel front-facing camera and a 5 megapixel back-facing camera, both of which are HD.
• Drawing all this together is the BlackBerry Tablet Operating system, created by QNX. The Operating system provides true multi tasking, as well as support for H.264, MPEG4 and WMV HD video.