RIM Tablet Playbook: Take That Apple!

RIM announced some details of its upcoming tablet PC yesterday. It is a "professional" tablet PC. As suspected, it will run QnX OS.

First, a little note. I was using QnX OS back in the late 80s for a security system for Citibank headquarters. We were developing a distributed monitoring station that would cover 24 floors, and the bank's gold safe. The OS version at the time was 1.4. It was simply a fabulous Unix-like OS that would run on PCs. 20 years later, the OS is still going very strong, powering thousands of real-time and mission critical devices, something  none of the other current tablet PC's OSs can claim, not even close.

Having said that, can the OS itself make the Playbook a killer? It will certainly help, but  a killer is made of many other features: apps and business model for example. AAPL does have a killer business model that enslaves its buyers and guaranteed the company profits. RIM has it for the Blackberry.

Details:

• 7-inch 1024 x 600 pixel touchscreen, smaller that the iPad’s 9.7-inch screen
• 1GHz dual-core processor and 1GB of RAM.
• 3 megapixel forward-facing camera and a 5 megapixel rear-facing camera, both high-definition.
• BlackBerry Tablet OS, developed by QNX, featuring true multitasking, as well as support for H.264, MPEG4 and WMV high-definition video. There’s also full web browsing thanks to a WebKit-enabled browser.
• Support for Adobe Flash 10.1, Adobe Mobile AIR, Java, OpenGL and HTML5 (of course they will support Flash!)
• 802.11a/b/g/n, Bluetooth
• microUSB and micro HDMI.
• Tight integration with BlackBerry handsets.

This is definitely targeted at business people, BlackBerry crowd.

Video: