At long last, the promised BlackBerry 4G PlayBook tablet is making an appearance. Attendees at the Consumer Electronics Show got a firsthand look at the Research In Motion device.
RIM will come to market with the PlayBook on Sprint Nextel’s 4G network sometime this summer. The company is hyping it as the first tablet to include wide area wireless connectivity and Sprint 4G to offer consumers download speeds 10 times faster than 3G, which is what Apple’s iPad gets on AT&T’s network.
“RIM believes a significant portion of the tablet market will want a higher-performing, multitasking, professional-grade tablet, and that is why we chose to design the BlackBerry PlayBook for premium performance with a powerful dual-core processor and multitasking OS,” said Mike Lazaridis, RIM president and co-CEO.
Meet the Tablet Competition
In what CES organizers have proclaimed the ‘year of the tablet,’ RIM is one of many entering the market to take on Apple’s iPad. But RIM won’t be the first to take a shot at the Mac maker.
“First up at the show will be Microsoft, which is expected to highlight its response to Apple and Android-based tablets by talking about Windows 8,” said Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group. “Surrounding this are the Google Android Honeycomb-based products built on processor architectures like Nvidia’s Tegra 2, which sport dual cores and heavy graphics, and stand-alone products like the Notion Ink Adam and RIM PlayBook.”
RIM will also find competition from Hewlett-Packard. Although HP already put out a Windows-based tablet that didn’t get off the ground, the company is reportedly looking to leverage its Palm acquisition with a Palm webOS-based, HP-branded tablet. However, Enderle said a HP Palm tablet could almost immediately seem obsolete when pitted against the future products being released at virtually the same time.
Does RIM stand a chance…