So Blackberry has revealed its iPad competitor, the PlayBook. Without access to the SDK, these are some of my thoughts:
1) It's running on QNX RTOS or some flavor of it. QNX has a long history in the embedded space and it's nice to see that Blackberry management does not fall victim to the "not invented here" syndrome.
2) It seems the primary application platform will be Adobe Flash/AIR and Blackberry OS 6 as the secondary, maybe as separate mode. Probably that means developers will use the Adobe toolchain and write code in Actionscript, with a backend compiler based on LLVM targeting a VM which runs on QNX or is a module within the kernel, or even a hybrid.
3) Specs-wise it looks good. Power management is unknown however.
The PlayBook will only be launched in 2011... I think this is a credible iPad alternative. However my long term bet is still on iOS devices because Apple still has the edge on content delivery.
1 comment:
Looks promising, but there are just too many unknowns:
- How mature is the BlackBerry Tablet OS given that it's version 1, no smartphone experience, etc.
- User Interface: you cannot compete with the iPad without an amazing user interface. We haven't seen anything yet…
- Price
- Battery life – with such impressive specs, that could be a problematic area.
- Apps: is it going to be purely web (given that Flash and Html5 are supported)? Or Java? How many apps will be available when the product is officially released?
Everything There Is To Know About BlackBerry PlayBook Tablet
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