On Monday, September 27th, RIM made an announcement that we had been expecting for some time. They unveiled their new tablet. We had speculated a couple months ago that this was coming and had thought we might see them name it the BlackPad. Fortunately, they went another direction, naming it the PlayBook.

I have to admit, I was surprised at what I saw with the device. RIM seems to have fallen a little behind the times of late with their hardware and lagging OS, but the PlayBook seems like a pretty nice leap ahead for them. The OS is not your typical BlackBerry operating system. This device will employ the BlackBerry Tablet OS designed and created by QNX which was recently acquired by RIM.

The device is a 7” Capacitive Touchscreen LCD with multi-touch support and a 1024 x 600 resolution. It will be powered by a 1GHz dual-core processor and 1GB of RAM which is quite nice considering we frequently see 512MB or less on mobile devices. The PlayBook has 2 HD cameras, one on the front and one on the back, both supporting 1080p HD video. The front camera is 3 megapixels and the back camera is 5 megapixels. The device supports HDMI, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth, but surprisingly has no 3G support at launch. 3G and 4G support are expected in later releases. Just as we saw in the BlackBerry Torch, this device employs WebKit and HTML5 for browser support. The PlayBook weighs less than 1 pound.

The PlayBook comes preloaded with Border’s Kobo reader. RIM says they chose to partner with Border’s and use Kobo as their reader due to their having an international e-bookstore and the ability to customize to the needs of specific countries. Since the e-reader is an important part of their tablet and given their desire to take a strong hold of the tablet market, this appears to make sense for them.

The PlayBook is scheduled to ship sometime in early 2011, but we don’t have a hard date, nor do we have specific pricing information at this time. As we have more information we will be sure to share it.

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