MANILA, Philippines—It took a while for the makers of BlackBerry to join the tablet race, but now that they have, Research In Motion has done so in a big way.
Members of the local press were given a chance recently to preview the new BlackBerry PlayBook ahead of its global launch, with company officials demonstrating the much-awaited device inside the so-called BlackBerry PlayBook Bus as it drove around the Makati Central Business District.
One thing that immediately grabs the user’s attention is the sheer brilliance of its 7-inch screen (similar in size to what is widely considered as the Apple iPad’s main rival, the Samsung Galaxy Tab).
Playbook’s high definition, multitouch screen puts out pictures with a resolution of 1024 x 600. Watching videos or playing graphics-intensive games on the PlayBook is an amazing experience, especially with its super fast 1 GHz dual-core processor, making it faster than many laptops currently being sold on the market.
The company describes the PlayBook as “the world’s first dual core, multi-processing, multi-tasking, ultra-thin, enterprise-ready, professional-grade tablet.”
The device is “perfect for either large organizations or an ‘army of one,’” as it is designed to give users “uncompromised Web browsing with full Adobe Flash support, true multitasking and high performance multimedia,” according to the firm.
Company officials, in fact, stress PlayBook’s ability to utilize Adobe Flash, putting it way ahead of its rival (read: the Apple iPad). They say a significant amount of Web content nowadays relies on this system shunned for so long by Apple.
However, one important feature of the device, which BlackBerry is touting as an asset, is the very same feature critics have come to sneer at: by itself, PlayBook is a Wi-Fi only device.
To access the Internet outside a Wi-Fi hotspot, the user will have to use a feature known as BlackBerry Bridge, which essentially tethers the tablet to a user’s BlackBerry smartphone and uses the latter’s data connection to connect to the Internet.
The device also uses this feature to do secure e-mail, browsing and the ubiquitous BlackBerry Messenger messaging service all coursed through the smartphone’s connection— something Playbook cannot do independently. Officials say this feature saves the user the hassle and cost of having to pay for a second SIM card to access the Web, unlike the Galaxy Tab or iPad, which require their own mobile connections.
Will Playbook succeed in dethroning the iPad? Only time will tell. But for certain, it is a worthy challenger.
No comments:
Post a Comment