More details about the BlackBerry tablet PlayBook

         

Company Research In Motion continued to lift the veil of secrecy over their first BlackBerry Tablet PC PlayBook, publishing new details about his device. It is reported that the company even plans to soon hold several meetings with application developers in Toronto, New York and San Francisco.

Among the details of the new device is reported that it, like the Apple iPad, will be offered in three versions: 16, 32 and 64 gigabytes. This is contrary to recent rumors that the tablet will be available only vosmigigabaytnoy version costs $ 399.

Information about how much will it cost tablet, is currently unavailable. Earlier, RIM executives said that the price of the basic version BlackBerry PlayBook be “less than 500 dollars.” Then immediately rumored that RIM is planning to dump Apple, offering a seven-inch tablet costs $ 100 less than the iPad. Nevertheless, voiced by the wording can mean $ 499, that is exactly the same as basic version of the tablet is Apple.

In addition to aggressive pricing policies aimed at reducing the competitiveness of the products Apple, the BlackBerry tablet PlayBook, as reported in the press, would very much like a competitor’s appearance. In particular, it refers to “very high quality glass, similar to that used on the iPad». Generally it is expected that the build quality of this device will be higher than that of tablets Android, available on the market today.

PlayBook will be equipped with dual-core gigahertz processor ARM Cortex A9. This will mean certain leap in performance with respect to iPad, which works on the gigahertz A4 single-core A8. The first comments from the experts, who managed popolzovavshis tablet, range from “works as a whole rather smoothly” to “there is some lag in the animation.

The current performance problems with the tablet may well be due to the fact that the operating system for PlayBook is not ready yet. Currently available only a few prototypes that are running the crude version of the firmware. At a meeting recently held in New York, was attended by over 150 developers, and devices for the whole room was only three or four.

Unfortunately for developers, RIM has not offered an emulator PlayBook a working browser. In fact, in the tablet is fully functional browser currently unavailable. Nevertheless, in January the company plans to offer developers an emulation environment and to complete the browser PlayBook, which will be developed with the help of a package of tools Torch Mobile.

Up to this point in BlackBerry PlayBook can only run applications based on Adobe AIR, created with Flash Builder. Theoretically, these applications will be able to work in the system Android, which also supports the standard AIR. Nevertheless, as reported, developers, porting the AIR application is not easy. ”

To date, using the AIR was founded about 50 applications. The following year, RIM plans to launch a Web-based platform called WebWorks, which is similar to webOS and Chrome OS. In addition, the company intends to present its own set of software development based on C / C for Java applications that are not based on Flash, with support for OpenGL 2.0, networking and data storage.

It is still unknown whether RIM plans to make available applications for BlackBerry available to PlayBook (which may require support for Java VM). Experts predict that it is hardly worth the wait. Indeed, the tablet will vary quite a different interface, not involving the use of a trackball and a physical keyboard. Partially confirmed these assumptions are the top-manager of Mike Lazaridis (Mike Lazaridis). On the question of when it is not a complete software PlayBook will be available for smartphones BlackBerry, he replied: “As soon as the dual-core processors capable of running on smartphones.”