After the long awaited BlackBerry 4G Playbook made its functioning debut at CES 2011 Wednesday (without a glass encasement), RIM has finally given some play time to journalists. Research in Motion (RIM) and Sprint have collaborated with the seven-inch tablet to compete in the tablet market with the revolutionary new QNX OS and 4G speed-worthy hardware.
While the specs are no less magnificent, Elecric Pig of the UK got an impressive demonstration of the device’s OS on video. With gentle swipes, lightening fast application response, and video playback as smooth as butter, QNX looks a hybrid of Android and iPhone OS with a bit of BlackBerry’s former OS’ still intact. Take a look for yourself below.
Aside from the 1 GHz dual-core processor and 4G speeds, the Playbook also supports Adobe Flash Player 10.1 and Adobe AIR so you can enjoy more games and media, including YouTube (and likely Hulu) as demonstrated above. The tablet has a front and rear HD cam for photography and video chat, a giant digital keyboard that you can bring up at any point with ease, and best of all, it can apparently handle Quake III. A RIM representative showed off a video to Electric Pig of a BlackBerry Playbook being used to play Quake with astounding results.
While most of the demos were pretty clean, a few glitches did occur when the RIM rep attempted to pull up the keyboard and move to pages rather quickly, but it’s quite negligible considering he was handling it backwards.
Currently there’s no release date set, but RIM’s press release anticipates Sprint to offer the BlackBerry 4G Playbook some time next spring. There’s also no price set yet. Nevertheless, we definitely recommend you start saving, because this won’t be coming cheap.
