Research In Motion (RIM) whose BlackBerry smartphone was a hit with corporate customers, is also targeting developers of consumer applications, including games and magazines.
The 7-inch tablet will be preloaded with applications such as Tetris – my favourite game on an Apple Macintosh during my college days, and the Kobo e-book reader.
An online version of Pro Football Weekly magazine will also be available for sports aficionados.
The PlayBook goes on sale in the US on April 19 and will feature a new operating system, a dual-core processor, and the capability to play applications for Google’s Android platform.
I had the chance to play with a beta release version of the PlayBook when it was first brought to Singapore three weeks ago and the display not only looked great, the processor was lightning fast, multi-tasking 8-10 CPU/graphics-intensive apps without showing any latency.
Although RIM has not been as successful as Apple or Google in attracting independent developers to write consumer apps for the BlackBerry, it is trying to rectify this with the PlayBook.
Hugo Miller from Bloomberg quoted Travis Boatman, senior vice president at Electronic Arts as being impressed with the PlayBook.
“It’s one of the fastest devices out there … You take a good software environment and great hardware, you’ve got a device that designers and developers can create great content on.”
The Redwood City, California-based company will release “Tetris” and “Need for Speed Undercover,” a car racing game, on the PlayBook.
RIM will be opening the PlayBook to Android apps to provide customers a wider choice of apps. There are more than 150,000 apps in the Android Market, compared with more than 25,000 in BlackBerry App World and more than 350,000 in Apple’s App Store.
“We are absolutely targeting the consumer, personal apps market as much if not more because there is such a vast market out there,” Tyler Lessard, head of RIM’s developer relations told Bloomberg in an interview.
Polar Mobile, a Toronto-based developer of apps for magazines including Time, GQ and Sports Illustrated, is building over 100 PlayBook apps including Pro Football Weekly, that will be ready in July, said Polar CEO Kunal Gupta.
Like other newcomers to the tablet scene, the PlayBook will be hoping to chip away at the market share of Apple, the market leader who has enjoyed little competition since the launch of its iPad in April 2010.
Analysts estimate that Apple has shipped more than 15 million iPads so far, and sold about 500,000 of the newly launched iPad 2, over its March 11 debut weekend.
Indulging in my own bit of speculation, both schools of thought may not be untrue. We might actuallly see an iPad announcement on March 2 followed by the taking of orders, with deliveries only materialising in June, probably staged out based on country.
