Research In Motion (RIM) has confirmed that its BlackBerry PlayBook tablet will launch in Australia in June this year, but has not yet been able to confirm any further pricing or availability details.
The company has been demonstrating the device in Australia for the past six weeks, and has launched it in the US and Canada, starting from US$499, but has so far played extremely coy about when it would release the tablet in Australia, noting only that it was scheduled to ship locally in the second quarter of 2011. Today, a RIM spokesperson confirmed a post on Twitter noting that the device was now slated to land locally in June.
The PlayBook has similar specifications to a number of other tablets available and currently launching in the Australian market, although it is smaller than most, with a 7″ display. Most tablets on the market today offer a 10″ screen.
Its dimensions are 130x194x10mm, and it weighs 425g. The display has a resolution of 1024×600 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.
The launch will come amidst the release of a number of other hyped tablets in Australia in mid-2010. Over the past month companies like Motorola, Samsung and Acer have all launched tablets locally based on Google’s Android platform, featuring ‘Honeycomb’, the latest version 3.0 of the operating system designed specifically for tablets. The PlayBook is based on Research in Motion’s own proprietary operating system, however — not Android.
However, the local tablet market remains dominated by Apple’s iPad offering, with the second version of the device from Cupertino still in short supply Down Under.
Image credit: Research in Motion
And its absolute rubbish.
I’ve used one for a few hours while I set it up the Exec.
Hardware is nice, the OS is nice the interface is ok but the rest is sub standard.
Piss weak email, with having to “bridge” to a blackberry to read any email/contacts/calendar.
If you have PGP (we do) you cant read PGP encrypted emails on the Playbook.
If you save sensitive documents on the play book and it gets stolen you cant remote wipe it.
Cant Policy it either.
I have such utter contempt for this thing. Disgusting and a prime example as to why RIM is losing ground RAPIDLY to Apple and Android.
@ Marcus,
Honestly did some one paid you for this posting?
@Naz
Ha. no.
I’m was a strong RIM fan. I’m angry at their inability to grasp the changing smartphone market, and now they seem to not care about enterprise and business.
QNX _should_ be a killer for iOS and Android.
Because android is open, it’s always going to be a serious fight to compete with.
its much better than ipad in terms of hardware specs multiasking, if all you care about is native email etc, well it will be available by the US summer. So thats not really something to fault the device, some companies actually prefer the bridge to have a zero footprint and no need to support a second device or second data plan.
PGP, its just a software update which will be rolled out im sure, probably once native email comes for the device.
QNX is a strong platform…sure there are some issues for a brand new OS, apple still have problems doing simple things like DST! , dont fall for marketing tricks, Apple made it look like they inveted tablets, yet they have been around for 10 years, and its hardware specs are average at best compared to other tablets on the market now. Many of the early adopters complaints about the playbook have already been fixed with firmware upgrades.
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