Research in Motion (RIM) has started pre-orders for the BlackBerry PlayBook. The company also announced that it will be available before June 22 in India.
The PlayBook was released in the US on April 19 but India was not among the initial launch markets.
The PlayBook has received mixed reviews internationally. Though it is acknowledged as competition to the iPad, it is still crippled in the form of features. It is dependent on the user's BlackBerry smartphone for basic features like Email, Calendar and BlackBerry messenger. It connects to a BlackBerry smartphone using an app called BlackBerry bridge to perform these functions. The PlayBooks will be updated to support these apps natively in the future.
But, it has a couple of other features that Apple's hugely popular tablet does not support. The biggest of them is support for Adobe's Flash which the iPad does not support. Also, PlayBook is the only tablet platform that has a Facebook app. Both the iPad and Google's Honeycomb tablets do not have native Facebook apps.
Hardware wise the PlayBook is quite formidable boasting of a 7-inch display, a dual-core 1GHz processor, and 1 GB of RAM and dual 5-megapixel and 3-megapixel HD cameras.
The PlayBook will be available in 16GB, 32GB and 64GB versions, though RIM has announced plans for 4G Long Term Evolution (LTE) variants too. As of now the company has not announced any pricing information but it is starts at $499 in the US. Judging by the pricing of the similarly priced iPad in the US, the PlayBook should launch in India at an under- Rs. 30,000 price-point.
Check out the review of the PlayBook here.