The war for tablets just got hotter, with Big Bazaar group’s futurebazaar.com starting to take orders for the Blacberry tablet ‘Playbook.’
The announcement has come three days after futurebazaar’s rival, Letsbuy.com had announced opening of pre-orders for Playbook’s rival, the Flyer from HTC.
The Playbook, a seven-inch ‘professional’ counterpart to the iPad, was announced a year ago by Research in Motion, the Blackberry maker, creating much excitement. However, the actual release of the product in the US was followed by extremely harsh reviews of the product, especially for making it dependent on a Blackberry phone for cellular connectivity.
It is around 0.4-inches thick, very slighly thicker than the iPad 2. At around 420 gm, it is comparable in weight to the Flyer and much lighter than the 700 gm plus iPad.
Futurebazaar did not give details of the pricing yet.
The starting price for the product is around Rs 24,000 in the US, implying it would be around Rs 28,000-30,000 in India.
It has a 1 GHz dual core ARM processor and also records full HD video on its 5 megapixel camera. Though it doesn’t have any cellular connectivity, it supports WiFi and also has a second camera, possibly to make video calls.
The cellular connectivity has been kept away from the device to appeal to bulk customers, such as big enterprises, who are worried about data leakage. When connected through the WiFi, companies can monitor the data traffic flowing through the device.
The display is classic TFT (not OLED), but capacitive and has the normal ‘netbook’ resolution of around 0.6 megapixels (1024*600).
The processor is from TI and runs the QNX OS here. It has 1GB of RAM, the highest amount found in tablets.
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