Hands-on: BlackBerry Playbook

Every CES seems to have a theme, the focus for last year was on 3DTVs, this year seems to be tablets. With almost every company attempting to cash in on Apple's successful iPad, the market will soon be flooded with options from around the world, and just about every hardware and software maker. BlackBerry unveiled their PlayBook a few months back, but this was really the first time consumers were able to get their hands on the device. Although this is still just a prototype device and not the final version, the device has managed to surprise some consumers. Today, I got a chance to play with the BlackBerry Playbook, which actually surprised me how good it is. Using a number of tablets this week, BlackBerry seems to have the most impressive table-OS and hardware. The lightweight tablet is only 400g, has a really powerful dual-core 1Ghz processor with 1GB of RAM. The tablet was very responsive, felt very solid and reliable, and just looked amazing. Multi-tasking on this device was shockingly good. As you'll notice in the video, you can have an HD video, game, web page and others things running at the same time without any lag. When it comes to tablets, I strongly believe the BlackBerry PlayBook will be a strong competitor in the market. Although the battery life hasn't been confirmed for this device just yet, the price, with a starting point of $399 for the 8GB model. The PlayBook will run a specially modified version of BlackBerry OS, which offers true multi-tasking, not task switching, a stylish swipe control feature that exits out of applications and brings up the multi-tasking menu.

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