Research In Motion (RIM) has given a strong indication that its PlayBook tablet will shortly be introduced to the Australian market, inviting local journalists to preview the device next week.
The briefings will be held on April 13 and 14 and will present a demo of the device, which – RIM says – won’t be a release version but what the company calls a “working” PlayBook, with all the functionality that has been released to date. No mention has been made yet of when the tablet will hit the Australian shores, although it will be available from mid-April to US and Canada customers, starting at US$499.
The PlayBook has dimensions of 130x194x10mm and weighs 425g. It sports a 7″ LCD display, with 1024×600 screen resolution and multi-touch functionality. It features a 1GHz dual-core processor, 1GB RAM and up to 64GB internal storage. It also comes with a 3 megapixel HD forward-facing camera a 5MP HD rear-facing camera and support for high resolution playback of videos.
The tablet also features a web browser that supports full Adobe Flash 10.1 and built-in support for HTML5.
If the tablet does hit Australia in the second quarter of this year, the launch will come nearly a year after Apple unveiled its own tablet device — the iPad — in Australia in late May, and after the second version of the iPad launched locally to great demand several weeks ago Apple’s device has already started making its way into RIM’s home ground, large organisations, with education departments in particular currently conducting trials of the tablet in school and university environments.
A number of other tablet devices are also launching in Australia this year — from manufacturers like Samsung, with rivals Motorola and HTC also expected to bring their devices to Australia eventually.
Image credit: Research in Motion
Type: “be available since from”.
Also, if it is shipping in the US and Canada in say the next 14 days, how on earth can they not have a production model here to demo it?
Cheers Rob, we’ve fixed the grammatical error.
I’ve been informed by RIM that the model being demonstrated to press is the identical hardware which is being shipped overseas. However, not all of the launch software features will be available yet, as they haven’t yet been announced. In summary, it looks like the models we’ll be testing will be complete enough so that we get a good idea about the device as a whole … but it won’t quite be ready for a full review yet.
I can’t wait …. no seriously! I think they will make a splash in business use.
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