After rebutting Steve Jobs for dismissing Blackberry as a serious mobile contender, Mike Lazaridis (co-CEO of RIM) made a surprising announcement after publicly demoing the Blackberry Playbook abilities (which appears at the end of this video).
RIM President and Co-CEO Mike Lazaridis showcased some amazing BlackBerry PlayBook apps yesterday at the Adobe MAX conference with Kevin Lynch, CTO of Adobe. The above video highlights some of what Mike and Kevin demoed during the keynote, such as the BlackBerry PlayBook’s multimedia capabilities (including web based videos using Adobe Flash), multitasking and the eUnity healthcare application. All apps demoed during the keynote were built by developers working with the BlackBerry Tablet OS SDK for Adobe AIR as part of an early access program. (Blackberry Developer Blog)
Although this move may help the company acquire some developer mind share, its still unclear whether consumers themselves will leap at the chance of owning a Blackberry Tablet, despite the fact that it supports flash (unlike the iPad).
While allowing developers to keep a Blackberry Playbook is a smart move for RIM (as it will help grow RIM’s anemic app store), the company may want to consider allowing developers to “borrow” a Playbook in order to test out their apps (as simulations can only take you so far).
Either way it’s great to see RIM actually demo the device in public, although only time will tell whether the Playbook will help revive RIM’s app store (which currently pales in comparison to Apple’s iPad app store).
Originally posted on October 26, 2010 @ 1:59 pm
The playbook will be a very practical choice as compared to Ipad. I cannot wait to develop for the Playbook.