Week in review: PlayBook enters tablet playing field

BlackBerry maker Research In Motion is attempting its own rewrite of the playbook for the nascent but increasingly competitive tablet market.

Showing the rest of the world that it's not just a boring, yet eminently reliable smartphone maker anymore, RIM on Monday unveiled its PlayBook, a tablet device due to hit the U.S. market sometime early next year.

As was widely rumored, RIM announced the PlayBook at the opening keynote event at its DevCon developer conference in San Francisco. The device has a 7-inch touch screen, is just under 10 millimeters thick, has a front- and back-facing camera for videoconferencing, a 1GHz dual-core chip, and 1GB RAM, 1080p high-definition video playback, Wi-Fi, and supports HTML5 and Flash-based video.

The PlayBook is aimed at people who do more work than play--RIM's calling it "the first professional tablet"--but the company is certainly not ignoring the world outside of the office. In fact, even though RIM is playing very heavily to its reliable, core audience of enterprise users, it's still making some bold moves with a new operating system that enables all sorts of fun, mindless apps (in addition to productivity apps), as well as adding a few features that even the Apple's iPad doesn't have.

On first impression, CNET Reviews sees the device taking on the iPad on the basis of its specs. However some huge, practical, questions remain unanswered relating to things like battery life, the price tag, storage capacity, memory expansion, release date, and who supplies the silicon inside.
• BlackBerry PlayBook, first impressions
• Everything we know about the BlackBerry PlayBook

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