BlackBerry PlayBook Tablet: An iPad Killer For the Suits [Video]

At today’s BlackBerry developer’s event, RIM announced their iPad-beater: the PlayBook. The 7-inch, 9.7mm thick tablet outputs at 1080p, e-reader functionality, and its own BlackBerry Tablet OS.

The guts sound pretty good up to now in addition: a 1GHz dual-core CPU, 1GB RAM, and a front and rear facing camera both with full HD. It’ll run flash 10.1 with hardware acceleration, supports HTML5, and has both HDMI and USB ports. And key for the business types: it’ll hook up with BlackBerry enterprise servers out of the box.

It’s not just for drones, though; RIM’s touting the tablet’s gaming abilities-there’ll be OpenGL support-in addition as a whole browsing experince. There are some treats here for developers in addition: in-app payments, a BlackBerry advertising service, and Adobe Air for app creation.

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA-(Marketwire – 09/27/10) – BlackBerry DEVCON 2010 -

Research In Motion (RIM) (NASDAQ:RIMM – News)(TSX:RIM – News) today redefined the chances for mobile computing with the revealing of its new professional-grade BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet and BlackBerry® Tablet OS.

Perfect for either large organizations or an ” army of one” , the BlackBerry PlayBook is designed to present users what they need, including uncompromised web browsing, true multitasking and high performance multimedia, while also providing advanced safety features, out-of-the-box enterprise support and a breakthrough development platform for IT departments and developers. The incredibly powerful and innovative BlackBerry PlayBook is actually a game-changing product within the growing tablet marketplace.

” RIM set out to engineer the only professional-grade tablet inside the industry with cutting-edge hardware features and one of the vital world’s most robust and flexible operating systems,” said Mike Lazaridis, President and Co-CEO at Research In Motion. ” The BlackBerry PlayBook solidly hits the mark with industry leading power, true multitasking, uncompromised web browsing and high performance multimedia.”

The Tablet You’ll Wish to Take Everywhere

This beautifully designed and incredibly powerful tablet is ultra portable, ultra thin and super convenient for both work and play. Measuring lower than half an inch thick and weighing lower than a pound, the BlackBerry PlayBook incorporates a vivid 7″ high resolution display that looks and feels great for your hand. With any such unique mix of utility, performance and portability, you’ll would like to take it everywhere.

The New Benchmark in Tablet Performance

At its heart, the BlackBerry PlayBook is a multitasking powerhouse. Its groundbreaking performance is jointly fueled by a 1 GHz dual-core processor and the most recent BlackBerry Tablet OS which supports true symmetric multiprocessing. Together, the abundant processing power and highly sophisticated OS enable the BlackBerry PlayBook to present users with true multitasking and a highly-responsive and fluid touch screen experience for apps and content services.

Uncompromised Web Browsing

With support for Adobe® Flash® Player 10.1, Adobe® Mobile AIR® and HTML-5, the BlackBerry PlayBook provides customers with an uncompromised, high-fidelity web experience and gives them the flexibility to enjoy the entire sites, games and media on the internet. For more than a decade, the mobile industry has worked to bridge the distance between the ” real web” and mobile devices through various apps and technologies and, in fact, a significant number of mobile apps today still simply serve as a proxy for web content that already exists on the web. The BlackBerry PlayBook closes that gap and brings the true, full web experience to mobile users while also opening new and more exciting opportunities for developers and content publishers.

High Performance Multimedia

The BlackBerry PlayBook features premium multimedia features to support high-quality mobile experiences. It includes dual HD cameras for video capture and video conferencing that could both record HD video collectively, and an HDMI-out port for presenting one’s creations on external displays. The BlackBerry PlayBook also offers rich stereo sound and a media player that rivals the ideal within the industry.

BlackBerry Integration

For those BlackBerry PlayBook users who carry a BlackBerry smartphone(i), it’s going to also be possible to pair their tablet and smartphone using a secure Bluetooth® connection. This implies they are able to prefer to use the larger tablet display to seamlessly and securely view any of the email, BBM™, calendar, tasks, documents and other content that resides on (or is offered through) their smartphone. They’re able to also use their tablet and smartphone interchangeably without worrying about syncing or duplicating data. This secure integration of BlackBerry tablets and smartphones is an extremely useful feature for those business users who wish to leave their laptop behind.

Enterprise Ready

Thanks to the seamless and secure Bluetooth pairing experience and the highly secure underlying OS architecture, the BlackBerry PlayBook is enterprise ready and compatible (out-of-the-box) with BlackBerry® Enterprise Server. When connected over Bluetooth, the smartphone content is viewable on the tablet, but the content actually remains stored on the BlackBerry smartphone and is just temporarily cached on the tablet (and subject to IT policy controls). With this method to information security, IT departments can deploy the BlackBerry PlayBook to employees out-of-the-box without worrying about the complete security and manageability issues that arise when corporate data is stored on yet one more device.

QNX Neutrino Reliability

The BlackBerry Tablet OS is built upon the QNX® Neutrino® microkernel architecture, one of the vital reliable, secure and strong operating system architectures on earth. Neutrino has been field hardened for years and is being used to support mission-critical applications in everything from planes, trains and automobiles to medical equipment and the most important core routers that run the web. The most recent BlackBerry Tablet OS leverages and builds upon the various proven strengths of this QNX Neutrino architecture to support a qualified grade tablet experience and to redefine the chances for mobile computing.

An OS Built for Developers

The Neutrino based microkernel architecture inside the BlackBerry Tablet OS delivers exceptional performance, high scalability, Common Criteria EAL 4+ security, and support for industry standard tools which might be already familiar to enormous quantities of developers. The OS is fully POSIX compliant enabling easy portability of C-based code, supports Open GL for 2D and 3D graphics intensive applications like gaming, and should run applications in-built Adobe Mobile AIR in addition as the recent BlackBerry® WebWorks™ app platform announced today (so as to allow apps to be written to run on BlackBerry PlayBook tablets in addition as BlackBerry smartphones with BlackBerry® 6). The BlackBerry Tablet OS may also support Java enabling developers to easily bring their existing BlackBerry 6 Java applications to the BlackBerry Tablet OS environment.

Key features and specifications of the BlackBerry PlayBook include:

- 7″ LCD, 1024 x 600, WSVGA, capacitive touch screen with full multi-touch
and gesture support
- BlackBerry Tablet OS with support for symmetric multiprocessing
- 1 GHz dual-core processor
- 1 GB RAM
- Dual HD cameras (3 MP front facing, 5 MP rear facing), supports 1080p HD
video recording
- Video playback: 1080p HD Video, H.264, MPEG, DivX, WMV
- Audio playback: MP3, AAC, WMA
- HDMI video output
- Wi-Fi – 802.11 a/b/g/n
- Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR
- Connectors: microHDMI, microUSB, charging contacts
- Open, flexible application platform with support for WebKit/HTML-5,
Adobe Flash Player 10.1, Adobe Mobile AIR, Adobe Reader, POSIX, OpenGL,
Java
- Ultra thin and transportable:
- Measures 5.1″ x7.6″ x0.4″ (130mm x 193mm x 10mm)
- Weighs not up to a pound (approximately 0.9 lb or 400g)
- Additional features and specifications of the BlackBerry PlayBook will
be shared on or before the date this product is launched in retail
outlets.
- RIM intends to also offer 3G and 4G models .

Availability

The BlackBerry PlayBook is predicted to be available in stores and other channels within the U.s. in early 2011 with rollouts in other international markets beginning in (calendar) Q2.

RIM will begin working with developers and select corporate customers next month to start out development and early testing efforts.

The BlackBerry Tablet OS SDK is planned for release within the coming weeks and developers can register for early access at www.blackberry.com/developers/tabletos.

For additional information, visit www.blackberry.com/playbook.

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This post is tagged: breakthrough development, development platform, enterprise support, hardware acceleration, performance multimedia, research in motion, san francisco california