Big announcement today:
PlayBook – the tablet from BB. Impressive hardware, impressive OS, limited dev tools
Hardware wise:
- dual core 1 GHz cpu – fast, very fast – the only doubt is the battery life, let’s see what the tests will reveal
- 1 GB ram, good, really good – will be enough for the next 2 years
- the screen is close to the retina display from Apple (I don’t know the spec, but is very close, I was able to see the pixels in the photo zoomed)
- missing the 3G module
- good addition 2 camera – one being the front facing camera
Software wise:
- QNX – many of the readers will be in the mist reading this name, let me gave you some background: 12 years ago windows 98 was shipping on a cd or on many, many floppy, QNX was downloadable as a demo version on a single 1.4 MB floppy. And was fast, I mean really fast. In 1.4 they crammed a full OS and a graphical interface. And was really impressive, with a microkernel architecture and one of the very few RTOS (real time operating system) was the best thing available. I never had the chance to play with the QNX as a developer but they were having a full SDK and the time demonstrated they were right, today we have the QNX around us all the time, is the quite hero.
- the down side – for now only HTML5 and Flash apps will be available on the PlayBook
Comercial wise:
- no news – no prices (yet)
- looks very thin
I will come back with some more news later