Angry Birds For PlayBook Announced

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I’m currently working on a BlackBerry PlayBook review for this site, so I’ll play the journalist integrity card and won’t comment on the quality of that device until my review is out. But, I do have a bit of news to tell you about. Angry Birds, the “Hello World” of touchscreen apps, is coming to the BlackBerry PlayBook. It’s already come out for iOS, Android and webOS, and is coming to Windows Phone this month. It was announced at the BlackBerry World conference in Florida today that Angry Birds is coming to the PlayBook.

The BlackBerry Playbook is running a new operating system which is officially being called the BlackBerry Tablet OS by RIM. It was called QNX OS when I was at CES and it’s obviously heavily based on the QNX OS that is used in many in-car entertainment systems, but they’re obviously trying some branding stuff by calling it the “BlackBerry Tablet OS”. Still, it’s practically a brand new operating system and they’ll need all the apps they can get. The news that they’ll be emulating some Android apps is great, but considering that Android developers will need to resubmit their Android apps to the BlackBerry App World, I don’t know how widespread it’ll be. Hopefully, Angry Birds coming to the PlayBook is a sign that the big developers are looking at the tablet and making moves to support it.

BlackBerry World is this week, as mentioned, and it doesn’t look like we’ll see any other new BlackBerry tablets announced. I definitely expected them to announce release dates for a 3G model of the PlayBook, or to possibly even announce a 10-inch version of the PlayBook. No, looks like RIM is playing the tablet card conservative at this point. Industry analysts have estimated that the PlayBook is selling very good, and even Best Buy has said that the tablet is doing well.

Keep us in your RSS reader – my TFTS official review of the PlayBook should be up sometime this week.