RIM co-CEO Mike Lazaridis did a follow-up interview to his talk at the IntoMobile Dive Into Mobile conference the other day to show off the BlackBerry PlayBook a little more and talk about how it’ll do.
If you haven’t had a chance to check it out, the BlackBerry PlayBook is RIM’s first tablet, due to land in Q1 (likely February). It’s got a 7-inch 1024 x 600 touchscreen, a 5 megapixel camera on the back, 3 megapixel camera on the front for video calling, a dual-core 1 GHz processor, 1 GB of RAM, and a new operating system based on QNX which is optimized for multimedia, stability, and multitasking.
The interview itself consisted of Lazaridis continuing to regurgitate PR-approved lines. He tried to pass off BlackBerry tethering as the equivalent of built-in 3G connectivity, though I think that will be a moot point once we see these module cavity upgrades become available. Still, it strikes me that the PlayBook’s initial target market will be limited to people with BlackBerry smartphones. When prodded about pricing, specifically compared to Apple products, and Lazaridis said the PlayBook is more powerful than the iPad, suggesting it would be more expensive, though he also said it would be competitive. Our best guesses put the pricetag between $399 and $599, which i would consider more standard than competitive. Lazaridis was also grilled on when when we can see the QNX OS on smartphones, and he stuck with his line earlier that it depended on when they get multi-core handsets made. One would hope sooner than later, considering RIM’s dwindling position in the U.S. market.
When asked about how the PlayBook will attract developers (aside from, y’know, giving them away), Lazaridis said “it’s foolish to fight the web,” and that web languages will be a big part of their developer strategy. Palm had the same idea with webOS, but I think the PlayBook will need some more robust language support if they want to attract hardcore developers of 3D games.
Anyway, here’s the whole video, if you’re interested.
[via AllThingsD]