The PlayBook is the first tablet released by BlackBerry. It was released yesterday by Research In Motion though there has not been much craze about the PlayBook unlike the Apple iPad2. This 7 inch Tablet is obviously lighter and smaller than the iPad2 and hence it would fit into your jacketpocket which both the iPad2 and Motorola XOOM cant.
The QNX OS
The QNX OS is a wonderful Operating System which has undergone 30 years of development and is much faster than the Android or the iOS. The PlayBook use QNX Operating System and hence it is really fast and slick giving very high performance. You can navigate through apps while the apps which are already running appear to be in the background. The OS surely make the User Interface of the PlayBook much user friendly. It also supports Flash but the number of apps available for this OS are limited. Android and iOS have thousands of Apps.
Features of BlackBerry PlayBook
The PlayBook is a light tablet but heavier than the Samsung Galaxy Tab and is 10mm thick and weighs 425g with 7 inch (1024 x 600 pixels) capacitive touchscreen 3which can recognize up to 4 simultaneous touches. The hardware also includes 2-core 1 GHz processor, 1 GB of RAM, accelerometer, gyroscope, digital compass and GPS.
Camera
The front camera is 2 Mega-Pixel and the rear one is 5 Mega-Pixel which enables 1080p Video recording. Lack of Flash would obviously disappoint you when you need to click pics in low light. It is also complemented with the stereo speakers and microphones.
What does it lack in?
We recently posted about some rumours about the PlayBook coming with the video chat feature but unfortunately it lacks 3G, hence no video chat available with it 🙁 Moreover the number of Apps are limited for the QNX OS. Hopefully RIM would make the PlayBook compatible with Android which would make the tablet support Android Apps too. Once this tablet becomes compatible with Android, it would surely be a Big Hit and a cause of worry to the iPad2. Apart from this it also lacks Flash which would not make your photos look better when clicked after sunset 😛 Lack of 3G is sure to disappoint you.
Price
As it lacks 3G, only the Wi-Fi versions are available with 16, 32, or 64 GB of flash memory for $499, $599 and $699 respectively.
My Verdict
The PlayBook is quite good when we consider the camera and the OS (ommitting the apps scarcity as RIM says it has thousands of apps in the pipeline). But 3G is one of the most wanted features in tablets. So I suggest you should go for Motorola XOOM which operates on Android 3.0 Honeycomb or the Apple iPad2 which is little costlier.