Laptop Thoughts: BlackBerry PlayBook Tablet Announced

"It looks like we might have spoken too soon. At this year's BlackBerry DEVCON, the possibilities are endless for Research In Motion. They have plenty of pent-up rumors and speculation being thrown around. Most of that around the BlackPad, the first tablet from the house that built BlackBerry. And, sure enough, RIM is working on a tablet device."

Pretty interesting announcement! For those of you not familiar with QNX (Que-nix), the basis for the PlayBook OS, it's a realtime POSIX OS (RTOS) developed in Canada in the early 1980s that was designed to be small, modular, symmetrical multi-processor capable, fast, and utterly reliable. In fact, back in the day it was used in all sorts of process control applications, and has evolved into controller software for many industrial applications. I even remember reading somewhere that it is (or was) used for controller software for nuclear reactors and is even used in Cisco IOS-XR Routers (BFRs). So, reliability? Oh yes. Can we expect the PlayBook to be fast? Oh yes. Am I eagerly awaiting this tablet? Oh yes!

Technical details: 9.7mm thick and weighing about 400g (less than 1-pound), the PlayBook will feature a dual-core Cortex A9 1GHz CPU, dual HD cameras, have 1GB of RAM, and a 7-inch display at 1024x600 resolution. It'll play hardware accelerated 1080p video (with Flash support), and has non-proprietary HDMI and USB connectors. It is a Wi-fi only device, but should support tethering to a BlackBerry. Additional details (like 3G and 4G support) to be announced by RIM, and availability is said to be early 2011.