The New Playbook

Today RIM held the BlackBerry Developer Conference in San Francisco. First, what is a developer conference and what is the goal of an event like that? A developer conference is a meeting of developers coming from a lot of different companies to talk about the platform. In this case, this is the RIM OS. You won't see a sum up of these meetings in the Matin or 24 heures because there are more than 48 hours of meeting and the majority of the time, they are talking about technical aspects of the OS. The most interessant meeting for the consumer is the presentation of new products. This year, they came with a reel innovation for them. They presented a tablet called Playbook.

A picture of the Playbook :

The Playbook is smaller than the iPad(7"vs 9.7"), has a 1024 x 600 - capacitive multitouch display, a Cortex A9-based, dual-core 1GHz CPU (the company calls it the "fastest tablet ever"), 1GB of RAM, and a 3 megapixel front-facing camera along with a 5 megapixel rear lens (and yes, there will be video conferencing like Facetime). In terms of interface, this is a mix between the new 6.0 Blackberry UI and WebOS (for the multitasking switch method). The PlayBook will be capable of 1080p HD video, and comes equipped with an HDMI port as well as a microUSB jack, 802.11a/b/g/n WiFi, and Bluetooth 2.1. It weights 400 grams.They didn't talk about the autonomy but I am sure it will be as good as the iPad because this is a strong point of the RIM OS.

Here is a video of the UI(User Interface):

I heard once in the classroom this year:"Yeahh, the iPad sucks, it's useless". You use the term useless alone, you'd better say it's may be useless for you. This is why I will explain all the things you can do with a tablet like this...

With a tablet, you can : 

• Browse the web
• Play games
• Do a video conference
• Use apps like Twitter and Facebook
• Read and send emails
• Take picture
• Read a book
• Use as a photo library
• ... a lot of other things

You can say something is useless when it have 250'000 apps available(for the iPad). Blackberry OS has for the moment only 1'600 apps available :/

I hope you have learnt something from this article and I wish you a good afternoon :D

If you want to learn more about the Blackberry Devcon click HERE

If you want to check the dedicated Playground's website click HERE

If you want more informations or want to give me money, please leave a comment and I will answer ASAP...

Sébastien Saez