BlackBerry PlayBook to Cost $500 (16GB) – Pre-Order Today

RIM has finally announced the price of the BlackBerry PlayBook, along with the details of when and where you’ll be able to buy it.

RIM is making the new tablet device available in over 20,000 locations around the US and Canada and have set the price at $499. For this price, you get the 16GB model. This particular model is the WiFi only model. For those wanting the larger capacity devices, these are priced at $599 and $699 for 32GB and 64GB respectively.

The PlayBook is another tablet device that we’d say could do well for RIM. The operating system used is based around QNX that RIM acquired in recent months. The new OS provides a fairly fluid interface as well as powerful multitasking which from our observations, works extremely well.

The technical specs reveal that the PlayBook tablet has a 7 inch screen which has a resolution of 1024 x 600 pixels. The screen uses capacitive touch. The processor is a 1GHz dual-core chip. It has 1GB of RAM as well as up to 64GB of storage (prices listed above). It includes front and rear cameras which can capture at 3MP and 5MP respectively. Wireless connectivity is built in of course.

The PlayBook also works as a companion device to a BlackBerry Smartphone. When opening up email, you actually connect via a smartphone and any changes you make on one device are seen on the other device. The downside is that the initial launch will only see email function for those wirelessly tethering to a smartphone. Once the tether breaks, the emails are taken off the PlayBook.

For those who need to connect up to a larger screen, HDMI is included via a micro HDMI port.

The browser looks to be quite powerful too and includes Adobe Flash as well as HTML5 compatibility.

What we don’t know at the moment is the release date although Best Buy and others do have pre-orders open now

The PlayBook is going on sale at a number of locations which includes (in the US):

AT&T
Best Buy
Cbeyond
Cellular South
Cincinnati Bell
Office Depot
RadioShack
ShopBlackBerry.com
Staples
Sprint
Verizon
BlackBerry from Wireless Giant