Wired Magazine has a really nice write up on there hands-on time with the new Blackberry PlayBook. For those that do not now the specs already, it runs on a dual core 1ghz processor, and an entire 1gb of ram. Wired notes how light the tablet is, coming in at .4″ thick and .9lbs it manages to be light, without feeling cheap. This features a 3mp front facing camera, and a 5pm rear which can also capture 1080p video (both of these specs beat out the Motorola Xoom). It also features a micro HDMI out, so you can watch those great movies you recorded as well (I think it would be very awkward to record a movie from a tablet).
Getting into performance the hardware in this make it run very smooth, multitasking works great; the ability to watch a 1080p video and swap through other applications is very nice. The PlayBook not only supports HTML5 video, but Flash as well; Wired did not that running two flash enabled sites caused the videos to be choppy. This performance limitation of Flash on a mobile device is further proof that though it may be nice to have Flash on a mobile system, the Flash player is not even close to being ready.
Wired pointed out that there is still no news on battery life, however one rep has pointed out “more than an hour”; I think he should have kept his mouth shut. Considering the extra power and features in this that the iPad does not have, I doubt it will really come close to the up to 10hrs of battery life Apple has blessed us with. The ability to tether with a existing BlackBerry doesn’t only add 3G data however it adds syncing as well, which is a very nice touch. It is reported that the 4G model will be out in the summer, so lets start holding our breath now.
