BlackBerry Playbook announced – the dual-core tablet to rule them all

RIM might be having a bit of hard time adapting their smartphones to the rapidly changing market but it might turn out that it’s all because they have been focusing their efforts elsewhere. The company just entered the tablet market with a bang, announcing their 7-inch BlackBerry PlayBook, running a new BlackBerry Tablet OS.

Coming with a SVGA (1024 x 600 pixels) multi-touch capacitive touchscreen, the PlayBook is the first tablet to sport a dual-core 1GHz CPU. And it makes quite good use of it too – both the front-facing and the primary camera of the device are capable of recording full HD video (yeap, that’s sweet 1080p footage) and on board the PlayBook has what RIM calls “true multitasking”. And with 1GB of RAM you are unlikely to have “out of memory” issues either.
But it doesn’t end there – there’s also Flash 10.1 and HTML5 support, microHDMI and microUSB ports and Wi-Fi a/b/g/n support. The primary camera can also take 5 megapixel stills, while the secondary one does 3MP. Secure Bluetooth connection is here too with 3G the only notable absentee. RIM are however promising 3G and even 4G versions of the tablet too.
All that goodness is packed in a body only 10mm thin and weighing 400 grams. Oh boy, is that exciting or what? Check out the official promo video of the new tablet.

Blackberry Messenger 6 is out, has become even more social

The Blackberry Messenger is among the finest proprietary mobile instant messaging services out there, with strong and dedicated crowd of followers. With the latest update of the app, the folks from RIM have kept all the familiar goodness, and added several new features, which have made the BBM even more social.

Now on with the new stuff. The Blackberry Messenger now features compatibility with some of your smartphone apps. They are dubbed as “BBM-connected”. You can communicate with your BBM friends directly from the app you are using, and invite them over to join your experience. There is also a new profile feed, which allows you to share game scores, etc., and click to download an app which someone else has shared.
All in all, it looks like RIM is seriously trying to make its users download and use more apps respectively. This is by all means a great idea, albeit one which should have been implemented a couple of years ago. It will be interesting to observe if this update of the Blackberry Messenger will help RIM in increasing the download rate of the apps for Blackberry OS, an area where the Canadian company is well behind the competition, as well as getting out of its recent troubles.
If you have already downloaded the new BBM version, feel free to share your experience in the comments section below. In case you are a Blackberry owner, and you still haven’t updated your messenger, hit the source link for download instructions.