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BlackBerry reveals iPad competitor

San Francisco - Canadian mobile company Research In Motion has announced the BlackBerry PlayBook - a  tablet computer with the Apple iPad clearly in its sights.

Joint CEO of Research In Motion, Mike Lazaridis announced the new product at the company's annual Devcon conference in San Francisco on Monday.

"I've got something I've been saving up for Devcon. This is something I'm really excited about," said Lazaridis before revealing the PlayBook.

The device has a 7 inch (18cm) high-resolution screen with two high-definition cameras on the front and back of the device. It has an HDMI port allowing it to play video out to televisions and projectors and a dual 1GHz processor with 1 GB of RAM.

"It's always on and it's ultra mobile. It's also ultra-thin at 9.7 millimeters," said Lazaridis.

"The first time you hold it, it just feels right and you want to take it with you everywhere you go," he added.

"We've made no compromise on web experience. The PlayBook has full Flash 10.1 support with hardware accelerated video," explained Lazaridis.

To reinforce the point that the PlayBook supports Flash, which the iPad does not, Lazaridis brought out Shantanu Narayen the CEO of Adobe, the company behind Flash.

Lazaridis added that the PlayBook is ready for business, besides for being very good at playing games and videos.

"CIOs can rest assured the PlayBook is enterprise ready," he promised.

"Just like BlackBerry smartphones, the PlayBook will become the enterprise standard."

BlackBerry also announced Tablet OS - a new operating system designed for the PlayBook.

BlackBerry did not announce pricing for the PlayBook and at time of writing it is uncertain when the device will go on sale.

- Fin24.com

 
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