BlackBerry Announces the Playbook Tablet: What Will It Bring to the Market?
It seems that just about every major telecommunications and computer manufacturer is presenting their tablet this quarter.
This week, the honor goes to Research in Motion (RIM) and their BlackBerry Playbook. That's great, but what does it bring to the table that is different from the others?
Well, for one, it runs on the proprietary BlackBerry OS. This is a big difference as the majority of tablets released recently utilize the Android OS platform.
Using the same BlackBerry strategy which targets business and enterprise users, RIM is touting the Playbook and the Tablet OS as being reliable and secure. Not exactly sexy words but the business world is rarely sexy.
Another difference between the Playbook and most competing tablets is its size. A screen of 7" puts them into the mini-tablet category which is not as crowded as the 9-10" category. The main competitor at this point in regards to tablet size is the Samsung Galaxy Tab which was announced a few weeks ago.
One final differentiator is that RIM plans to initially launch the tablet as a Wi-Fi-only device. In addition, the user can easily pair the Playbook to their BlackBerry smartphone for connecting to 3G.
The idea is that you won't have to pay for another monthly subscription if you already have a BlackBerry plan. The inclusion of Wi-Fi also lets the user create a Wi-Fi hotspot using Wi-Fi sharing-capable smartphone so remote Internet access will not be restricted simply to BlackBerry phone owners.
In addition to the Playbook's differences from the competition, the tablet has features that match other tablets including video conferencing, multimedia capabilities (including Flash) and a promising app platform. Now the only question is, what is the price? Unfortunately, that is still part of the BlackBerry playbook that hasn't been written.
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