The Blackberry PlayBook launched in the U.S in April 2011, at the time when all other companies have launched their tablets. The play book features a 7inch high resolution display which is 1024X600 WSVGA capacitive touchscreen with 4-finger multi-touch display and gesture support looks business-chic. The display is brilliant even in bright sunlight. Seems a bit heavy for its size though at 425gms. With a back that’s sort of rubberized, this thing is built tough and could take a few nasty falls easily. The playbook is available in 3 different storage versions with 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB versions. There’s no support for micro SD and SIM card. The only buttons that are located on the top of the device and considering the width of the playbook is just 10mm,the buttons are bit tiny but adequate. One button switches the device on and off and other three are for volume control/scroll/media.

 The PlayBook comes with a microsUSB slot for charging and connecting it to PC as well as an HDMI port that allows you to directly play movies or presentations on the compatible displays. The PlayBook comes with 2 cameras, a 3mp camera in the front and a  5 megapixel camera in the back.

The playbook features QNX that is the OS of the blackberry tablet and boasts of multiprocessing capabilities and is an admirable piece of software-definitely an industrial strength piece of work that doesn’t crash. The tablet has a 1GHz dual core Cortex A9 CPU that results in fantastic performance. Touch controls are on the margin of the bezel and with a finger swipe you can switch between apps/windows as well as activate menus. A swipe from bezel to bezel starts the device when it is in sleep mode.

The browser is perhaps the best RIM has built to date and is full-featured with Adobe Flash 10.3 enabled. With built in support for HTML 5 this is as good as standard desktop browser and it is sort of a strong advantage of the PlayBook. Another strong point of the PlayBook is that it support almost all media formats. The audio speakers are definitely nice and delivers amazing sound output. The 5 megapixel camera in the rear is terrific and clicks amazing pictures even in fairly low light.

Though the native e-mail, calendar and memo apps are not available, if ayou are blackberry smartphone user you can easily use3 BlackBerry Bridge to teether your phone with the tablet and you’ll be able to access your e-mail, BBM, calendar and memos even in the absence of Wi-Fi using the Bridge browser.

Battery life is quite good, about 5.5 to 8 hrs from the inbuilt Li-Po 5300mAh battery with mixed use. All in all the PlayBook is a tablet that you will like although it has lousy app store its like RIM built a supercar and there is hardly any road to drive it, and priced at 28k that goes to 37k for the top version, the PlayBook is not  cheap tablet to buy. If you are blackberry lover then go for it and if not then you should wait for blackberry to improve its app store.

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