Playbook, as is the name of the first tablet touchscreen RIM unveiled yesterday at the September 27 launch of the keynote DevCon 2010 conference for developers of BlackBerry in San Francisco. And therein lies the biggest surprise of this announcement also eagerly awaited. Specifications are indeed quite consistent with what the rumors suggested. By its design and dimensions, the tablet is similar to the Galaxy Tab Samsung, and it shows lighter and more compact than the Apple iPad. It includes a 7 inch screen (18 cm diagonal), weighing around 400 grams and a thickness of 9.7 mm. The playbook is equipped with two cameras, one front for video conferencing applications to be delivered as standard. As expected also, the device only has Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. It is designed to pair with BlackBerry smartphones to take advantage of 3G connectivity. Its price and autonomy remain an enigma to this day.
A shelf company
Even if RIM promotes its multimedia capabilities and playful, the playbook is open in the corporate market. Its processor double heart 1 GHz and 1 GB of RAM make the tablet's most powerful market, designed to accommodate multitasking environments.The playbook is compatible with the BlackBerry Enterprise Server Enterprise Services (BES), which can be administered through IT policies identical to those of smartphones. There is also the technologies of data compression and encryption that made the brand successful in business environments.
Occupy the land
Still, it is only an announcement effect, intended to occupy the land, while the first Android shelves are defying the iPad and the devices running Windows 7 are expected for Christmas. Because nobody could touch the playbook or play with the user interface. The latter has also been qu'entraperçue in a video. Despite the short for the first quarter of 2011 in the United States (and for the second quarter in Europe), the tablet is still in the prototype stage. This is hardly surprising given its operating system, from the redemption of QNX last April, is still in the throes of development, as admitted by its creators. However, as stated by the creator of QNX, the images from the video shown at the conference are not the result of editing, but many real sequences filmed on the current prototypes.
A very original OS
The originality of the playbook is its operating system derived from QNX. Created in 2001, this OS is based on a micro-kernel extremely compact whose characteristic is to run almost all of lower layers (drivers, network file system) in user mode. The result is extremely robust, symmetric multiprocessing management and a high level of security, the core being certified according to Common Criteria EAL4. The BlackBerry Tablet OS QNX kernel Assistant user interface and several multi execution environments: a Java virtual machine (especially designed to ensure compatibility with applications appworld current smartphones), a runtime environment for native applications written in C / C a Runtime Environment Web (based on WebKit HTML5 and CSS3) with full support for Flash 10.1 and hardware acceleration, and finally the Adobe AIR framework.
Emergency side applications
Whatever the qualities of the new system, the success of the Tablet BlackBerry based primarily on its software offerings. Now that the SDK will allow developers to start working on the platform will not be available for several weeks (we're talking about late October at best). BlackBerry hopes that support for Flash and Adobe Air will speed up porting applications from other environments. The brand also relies on the compatibility of the tablet with its new development environment WebWorks, simplifies business developments. Finally, the availability of compilers C + + and OpenGL should also promote the porting of games (including titles created for the iPad).
RIM has posted a video demonstration of the playbook that shows precisely not the camera, proof if any were needed, that the product unveiled yesterday is still far from being finalized.
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