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BlackBerry PlayBook – An Overview ( Release Date, Specs, Features )

by Catalin Mengheris on March 5, 2011

[This article will be constantly updated with the freshest BlackBerry PlayBook news so scroll towards the end to find out the latest about RIM's tablet]

01. BlackBerry Playbook’s Features – A More In-Depth Look
02. Blackberry PlayBook Against The Competition

RIM’s BlackBerry PlayBook has been really acting up these past few weeks as it has grabbed a headline here and there so I decided to give you dear readers a quick look at what the fuss is all about. Hopefully, this BlackBerry PlayBook overview will give you a basic idea on why the tablet has been hugging the news feeds on a rather big number of pages.

The BlackBerry PlayBook is probably one of the most portable tablets I’ve gotten to see around the market, reminding me of the Samsung Galaxy Tab because of its high level of portability. This is actually rather an ongoing argument regarding the optimal size of a tablet and I won’t get into that, but let me tell you that it sure looks small and portable. To give you an idea of RIM’s tablet size, the BlackBerry PlayBook comes in with a height of 5.1 inches ( 130 mm ), a width of 7.6 inches ( 194 mm ) and a thickness of 0.4 inches ( 10 mm ) while weighing in at 0.9 lbs ( that’s 425 grams ).

BlackBerry PlayBook Specs

RIM’s BlackBerry PlayBook comes with a 7 inch LCD display which sports a resolution of 1024 x 600 pixels, being your standard multi-touch capacitive screen.

Spec wise the PlayBook is rather impressive as it does come with a 1 GHz dual-core ARM A9 Cortex processor and 1 GB of RAM, although I cannot say if it’s DDR2 or not ( like in the Motorola Xoom‘s case ).

The BlackBerry PlayBook will come with 3G network access if you decide on using your BlackBerry smartphone as a modem, and to get more of an in depth view of how this works, check out a previous article regarding the 4 different profiles the PlayBook comes with.

You’ll also get 4G network connectivity, which will be available on the BlackBerry 4G PlayBook tablet and of course Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n and Bluetooth 2.1+ EDR.

On the media front the BlackBerry PlayBook comes with a 3 megapixel front-facing camera and a 5 megapixel HD rear-facing camera with codec support for 1080p HD video, H.264, WMV and MPEG4. The device also features a micro USB port and a micro HDMI port.

The thing which most users will be aware of when buying the BlackBerry PlayBook will be obviously the compatibility with their current BlackBerry products, but worry not as the PlayBook will be coming with out-of-the-box compatibility with the BlackBerry Enterprise Server, the ability to instantly pair your tablet with your smartphone as well as secure connectivity to your corporate date and your existing RIM products.

The operating system for the BlackBerry PlayBook has been redone as well thanks to the fine folks over at QNX so you will get, according to RIM, true multitasking and as far as the first preview videos go, this is true to quite a large extent.

Make sure to keep an eye out for the BlackBerry PlayBook and I hope that this overview to the Playbook did help you out in deciding if it’s something you wish to invest in.

The WiFi BlackBerry Playbook has been released, both in US and Canada, on April 19th. In UK RIM’s tablet has been released on June 16th.