Introducing BlackBerry PlayBook – BlackBerry’s Attempt at beating the iPad

Yesterday at BlackBerry’s Annual Developers Conference, Research in Motion CEO Mike Lazaridis announced the company’s new tablet — the PlayBook.

The tablet is set to run a new OS called QNX which offers full OpenGL and POSIX support alongside web standards such as HTML5. Lazaridis was joined on stage by the company’s founder, Dan Dodge, who said that “QNX is going to enable things that you have never seen before,” and added that the PlayBook would be “an incredible gaming platform for publishers and the players.” RIM also touted the PlayBook’s ability to handle Flash content via Flash 10.1, as well as Adobe AIR apps.

The PlayBook has been described as “the First professional tablet’’, which carries a 7” screen at 1200 x 600 resolution with multi touch capabilities and support for 1080p HD videos. The PlayBook is packed with Cortex A9-based, dual-core 1GHz CPU (the company calls it the “fastest tablet ever”), 1GB of RAM and a 3 megapixel front-facing camera along with a 5 megapixel rear lens which will support video conferencing.
How much internal memory the PlayBook has is still a question but it is most likely to be available in 16GB and 32GB variants, but it doesn’t end there – the PlayBook also has a micro USB jack,WiFi and Bluetooth2.1 and all this weighs in at only 400g.

Specifications:

The release date is expected to be in early 2011 but no price has been revealed yet. Check out the preview video of the PlayBook:

Check out more on PlayBook’s official website here.