BlackBerry Tablet to Cost Less than $500
BlackBerry Tablet to Cost Less than $500
Posted 11/11/2010 at 5:05am
| by Paul Lilly
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According to a Bloomberg report, Research In Motion (RIM) plans to sell its BlackBerry PlayBook tablet in early 2011 for less than $500, which can be viewed as an attempt to sweep the legs out from under Apple's iPad.
The cheapest iPad available runs $499, which gets you the Wi-Fi only version with 16GB of storage, or you could spend as much as $829 for the flagship model with 64GB and 3G baked in. Samsung's Galaxy Tab so far is the only tablet to really challenge the iPad, but it too is pricey, especially if you don't commit to a 2-year service agreement.
First run PlayBook devices will only come with Wi-Fi, but its sub-$500 price tag could spark a price war among tablet makers, of which there looks to be many.
"There's going to be a lot of tablets on the market so I think pricing is going to start coming down," said Matt Thorton, an analyst at Avian Securities LLC in Boston.
Like the Galaxy Tab, RIM's PlayBook is a 7-inch slate, compared to the iPad's 9.7-inch screen. It will come ARMed with a Cortex A9 dual-core processor clocked at 1GHz, 1GB of RAM, 3MP front-facing camera, 5MP rear camera, and 16GB or 32GB of storage. Other features include HDMI, microUSB jack, 1080p playback (via HDMI), and Bluetooth.
Image Credit: RIM
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googler
November 12, 2010 at 1:26pm
Nook Color is better for reading than iPad and better for everything else than Kindle. Nook Color is better for $249. Nook Color screen is supposed to be better (less reflective) for reading than iPad thanks to new LG screen with anti-reflection coating. It allows to watch videos, listen to the music, view Office documents and PDF's. The Nook Color will not run apps straight out of the Android Market, but that does not mean it cannot run them. In fact, they have done a lot of tests on apps from standard Android smartphones and they pretty much run on Nook Color, which has Android 2.1 under the hood. (The Nook native interface and apps are just standard Android application layers.) Barnes & Noble special Nook SDK runs on top of the standard Android one and gives developers access to exclusive extensions and APIs for the Nook and its interface. So porting Android apps is not difficult. B&N says it is more like optimising them for Nook than porting them. If you prefer e-Ink screen, the original Nook is still available from BN.
Tekzel
November 12, 2010 at 2:56pm
I'm THIS close to pulling the trigger on one of those Nook Colors. I primarily want it for reading, but mostly for my own content. Notes for college. I am just waiting for them to hit the stores so I can swing by and see one in person.
Its a nice side benefit that it can do other things, email, social stuff. I also imagine it will have a replacement rom made by someone in the Android community within a week of release. Haha.
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