RIM Announces BlackBerry PlayBook Tablet 184
siliconbits writes "Today, at the BlackBerry Developers Conference in San Francisco, company President and co-CEO Mike Lazaridis kicked off the event with the widely-anticipated news that RIM is developing a tablet PC of its own. Called the BlackBerry Playbook, the device is a 'Flash-loving,' 'device-paring,' 'enterprise ready' tablet, says RIM, with a 7-inch screen. It is 9.7 millimeters thick and features a 1024x600 widescreen display. It also supports 1080p through HDMI and has a USB port."
The tablet will run on a dual-core, 1GHz CPU and have 1GB RAM. Its browser will be WebKit-based, and the device will be running a brand new operating system developed by QNX software. The tablet won't have 3G access of its own when it launches, but will be able to tether to existing BlackBerry devices via Bluetooth.
Re:hmm (Score:5, Informative)
Dual-core Cortex A9 processor: The A9, at the same clock speed, is 20-30% faster than the A8. This has two of them. We're looking at almost triple the iPad's processor power.
1GB of RAM vs 256MB
QNX-based multitasking OS - depending on how they dumbed it down, could be way beyond iPhone OS
1024x600 at 7" vs 1024x768 at 10" - I think the pixel density on the PlayBook is at least a bit higher.
Perfect Tablet (Score:3, Informative)
Triple core ARM setup with HD video playback
Symmetrical rectangular ABS plastic frame with shatterproof glass
- docking port/HDMI on the bottom
- USB3 on left and right
- evenly spaced screw beds around the sides for accessory bodies/attachments
- VESA plate for the back
PixelQi display (indoor/outdoor/e-ink)
Stylus or touch input
Front and rear 3 to 5MP cameras
- allow slack for the rear camera connection so the lens can be integrated into a larger body
Built in stereo mic
Built in stereo speakers
Mini PCI slot instead of built in 3G
GPS with compass
Accelerometers
Keep things squared off and let the consumer decide if they want to buy cheap silicone to round it off. That makes it easier for vendors to design bodies to add laser scanners or extended batteries or label printers or whatever.
Re:What's with the humongous bezels? (Score:2, Informative)
You must have never used a tablet for any serious amount of time...
If the bezel on the iPad was any smaller, it would border on useless due to inadvertent touches. The wide bezels gives you an area to actually grab/hold the tablet. Otherwise, you're touching the touch screen and all hell breaks loose. It's not always feasible to cradle or rest the tablet on a surface. (E.g., reading in bed)
While a narrower bezel would look "cooler", it has no basis in reality. Some concepts remain concepts for a reason.
Re:Must really hurt to be MS these days (Score:4, Informative)
I bet MS has a better SDK on release than RIMM though.
http://na.blackberry.com/eng/developers/tablet.jsp [blackberry.com]
App Dev *only* via HTML5/CSS or Flash.
LOLWHUT?! (Score:3, Informative)
Really. QNX is many, many years BEHIND Linux right now.
Yeah, they have a microkernel with hard-realtime support and good maximum latency (which Linux can't match just yet).
However, if you look closely - it's not so great. Unix subsytem, filesystem and network stack all run inside one big process. So if it crashes it's almost as bad as kernel crash in Linux.
QNX's support for massive SMP (more than 8-16 CPUs) is bad, its scheduler is not quite good enough.
Various elements of QNX stack are hindered by microkernel approach as well. For example, you can forget about things like receive packet steering ( http://lwn.net/Articles/362339/ [lwn.net] ).
QNX's support for 'transparent distributed processing' is just a joke. It's not usable in practice at all, because of overhead of message passing (which is usually assumed by applications to be extremely cheap).
Re:"Play"book (Score:3, Informative)
Not a phrase I'd ever come across before in the UK, so I googled it, "playbook" refers to a notebook containing (American) football plays, which would explain why it is a US-business speak phrase.
Re:LOLWHUT?! (Score:2, Informative)
Parent poster is full of it.
First off, what is a unix subsystem? And second of all, the filesystem and network stack ARE separate processes.