As the biggest names in technology prepare to fight Apple Inc's iPad, their best hope may be to avoid a head-on confrontation and focus on niche and low-priced products instead.
Research In Motion (
RIM.TO) unveiled a tablet computer on Monday it hopes will leapfrog Apple's (
AAPL.O) iPad, highlighting its potential for gaming, media publishing and corporate use.The BlackBerry PlayBook will have a seven-inch (18 cm) screen and dual facing cameras. It has WiFi and Bluetooth but needs to link with a BlackBerry smartphone to access the cellular network. It can then mirror the phone, giving users a bigger screen to view and edit media, and wipes all corporate data once the link between the two devices is broken.RIM expects to ship the device to enterprise customers and developers in October. It will become commercially available early in 2011. An exact price has not been determined, but RIM sees it in the lower range of prices for consumer tablets already in an increasingly congested market. (Reporting by Gabriel Madway in San Francisco and Alastair Sharp in Toronto. Here is
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Here's the specs from the press release announcing the PlayBook:
- 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 portable:
- Measures 5.1"x7.6"x0.4" (130mm x 193mm x 10mm)
- Weighs less than 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 in the future.
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