The official landing page and press release is out for the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet and the specs are pretty awesome. The PlayBook is the first professional-grade tablet and features some huge OS improvements with technology from QNX. The major specs and features for this device include:
7” LCD, 1024 x 600, WSVGA, capacitive touch screen with full multi-touch and gesture support
BlackBerry Tablet OS with support for symmetric multiprocessing
1 GHz dual-core processor
1 GB RAM
Dual HD cameras (3 MP front facing, 5 MP rear facing), supports 1080p HD video recording
Video playback: 1080p HD Video, H.264, MPEG, DivX, WMV
Back in mid-April, Adobe’s CEO Shantanu Narayen said they would be on target to deliver Flash 10.1 for smartphones in the first half of 2010. Adobe pretty much made good on this and has delivered 10.1 to manufacturers such as Google and RIM to allow them to deploy it on their devices.
It should be interesting to see how long it will take for Flash 10.1 to be made available to BlackBerry users. Also, it’s not clear exactly how well it will perform on the device. According to Adobe, Flash 10.1 will allow users to experience rich Flash web content as well as play games, view animations, experience rich Internet applications (RIAs), data presentations and visualizations, ecommerce, music, video, audio and more. Continue reading ‘Adobe Flash 10.1 Released to Manufacturers Including BlackBerry’
UPDATE: Eric Zeman over at InformationWeek makes a good point that Flash 10.1 isn’t technically delayed. Adobe has confirmed for InformationWeek that it is in fact on schedule to deliver Flash 10.1 to smartphone manufacturers. Adobe spokesperson Stefan Offermann told InformationWeek via email, “Adobe is still on track making Flash Player 10.1 for first mobile platforms including Android available before the end of the first half of 2010.” When Narayen spoke to Fox Business about Flash 10.1 arriving on BlackBerry in the 2nd half of 2010, what he really meant was that it will take some time for the companies to actually deploy. So a minor correction here, and we’re still looking forward to seeing Flash on BlackBerry.
Shantanu Narayen, CEO of Adobe, was on Fox Business talking about the latest CS5 announcement but the real news was when he was asked about smartphones and BlackBerry in particular. Previously, we reported that Adobe Flash 10.1 would be coming with general availability expected in the first half of 2010, and now it seems this has been delayed to the second half of 2010.
Flash 10.1 on BlackBerry is going to do some great things for the BlackBerry user experience, as we’ll not only be able to view Flash video content, but applications written in Flash are also expected to be able to run on BlackBerry. I’m hoping somebody ports Robot Unicorn Attack to BlackBerry as soon as it’s available.
BlackBerry apps are going to get very consumer friendly, very fast as RIM keep making announcements about new features and services for developers that appeal to the consumer market.
Today, at the BlackBerry Developer Conference, RIM and Adobe announced that creative professionals and application developers will be able to use the Adobe Flash Platform and Adobe Creative Suite content development and authoring tools, to easily create rich content and application experiences for BlackBerry.
With Flash, OpenGL support and the new GUI builder, BlackBerry apps in 2010 are going to look very different than in 2009.
