BlackBerry PlayBook Tablet Specs & Features Explained, Video Included

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RIM managed to surprise us all with the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet that was made official today at the Developer Conference 2010, and we’re definitely happy to see that all those BlackBerry tablet rumors we’ve been reporting on turned out to be true. In fact we have just shown you the specs and features of the device, as taken from the official press release, but let’s look a little closer at what RIM showed us today.

The BlackBerry PlayBook is RIM’s amplification of BlackBerry. It’s BlackBerry taken to the next level and we hope it will definitely turn out to be a bestseller device.

The PlayBook is a 7-inch tablet that’s highly portable, measuring just 9.7mm and weighing just 0.9 pounds. But the tablet isn’t light under the hood at all: we’re looking at a 1GHz dual-core processor with Cortex-A9 on both cores, with symmetric multiprocessing and multitasking (wow that’s impressive), 1GB of RAM, Wi-Fi a/b/g/n, Bluetooth, microHDMI and microUSB connectivity, two HD cameras, 3- and 5-megapixel, HD recording and video playback, support for all kinds of web components, Flash included and a brand new BlackBerry Tablet OS to make everything run as smoothly as possible. 3G and 4G connectivity will be available from future models, but you’ll always be able to tether a smartphone for some 3G PlayBook surfing while on the go. And here’s RIM’s video of the PlayBook:

RIM sounds pretty excited with this product, and from where I am watching it all, they deserve to be. The PlayBook will offer you an impressive mobile browsing experience as it will offer WebKit, HTML5 and Flash 10.1 support. Naturally the device, being a BlackBerry, will be ready for work-related stuff too. It will be compatible with BES servers out-of-the-box, and considering the power under the hood you’ll be able to use it as a work horse too whenever the need arises.

QNX is the company behind the OS that’s supposed to support all your needs on the BlackBerry PlayBook and I definitely like what I’m seeing so far. While the Galaxy Tab wasn’t able to impress me in a similar manner, and I hold the iPad as the standard tablet, even if it has plenty of flaws, the PlayBook already has some very interesting features so far. Let’s just hope it will be a more than affordable device ready to sell in millions of units.

But there’s one minor problem the PlayBook might have, right out-of-the-box: a proper content store. The iPad wouldn’t be the hot device that it is without iTunes, the App Store and the iBookstore. Hopefully RIM is going to bring more suitable apps to its tablet, not to mention music, video and eBooks by actual launch, later next year.