Yesterday marked the release of the new Blackberry Playbook, which is a tablet that is said to compete with the iPad 2 and the Xoom.  The Playbook is smaller than the two popular tablets but packs a big punch and will be a thorn is the side of Apple and Motorola.  The Playbook doesn't have any buttons on the front of the device, instead all is controlled with touch gestures.  It took a while for me to get use to the gestures and kept on forgetting what does what.  This device will be difficult for people to get use to especially when you don't have a home button that is easy to push to get to the home menu.  Other than that the device is overall fun to play with and the user interface is well set up.  Lets take a look at the specs of the Blackberry Playbook. 


Ultra portable, super convenient
Height 5.1" / 130mm
Width 7.6" / 194mm
Depth 0.4" / 10mm
Weight 0.9 lbs / 425g
7" LCD display, 1024 x 600 screen resolution
Multi-touch, WSVGA, capacitive screen

Professional grade performance
Get started easily – simply swipe-to-wake
Full computing power in a tablet format
1 GHz dual-core processor, 1 GB RAM
Symmetric multi-processing
Accelerometer, 6-axis motion sensing (gyroscope), digital compass (magnetometer) and GPS
Micro USB port

Uncompromised web
Games, media, apps and everything the real Internet offers
Full Adobe® Flash® 10.1 enabled
Built-in support for HTML 5
No-compromise rendering of text, graphics and video

Connect anytime, anywhere
BlackBerry PlayBook tablets will offer support for network configurations as follows:
BlackBerry PlayBook with Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n
BlackBerry 4G PlayBook with Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n + WiMax
BlackBerry 4G PlayBook with Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n + LTE
BlackBerry 4G PlayBook with Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n + HSPA+
All BlackBerry PlayBook tablets support Bluetooth® 2.1+EDR

Amplified BlackBerry experience
Wirelessly connect to your BlackBerry® smartphone* for real time access to:
Email, calendar, address book and task list, using
BlackBerry® Bridge™

Best-in-class media
3 MP high-definition forward-facing camera
5 MP high-definition rear-facing camera
Stereo speakers and stereo microphones
Crystal clear video; H.264, MPEG4, WMV HDMI video output
Micro USB and Micro HDMI ports

Business ready
BlackBerry Bridge technology
Corporate intranet browsing
DocsToGo, Adobe Reader
Enterprise VPN

BlackBerry Tablet OS
Powerful, user-friendly QNX technology: It’s what the World Wide Web runs on
Multi-processing for true multitasking
First and only microkernel based end-to-end real time
operating system

Rich application ecosystem
Rapid development environment
Reliable BlackBerry Tablet OS, powered by QNX technology
Supports POSIX OS, SMP, Open GL, BlackBerry® 6, WebKit, Adobe Flash, Java® and Adobe Mobile AIR