After a long wait, Research in Motion announced Tuesday morning pricing for its PlayBook tablet identical to Apple’s iPad 2. The 16GB Wi-Fi version is $499 32 GB costing $599 and a 64GB model priced at $699. RIM’s tablet hits U.S. and Canadian Best Buy stores April 19.
“Previews of the BlackBerry PlayBook have generated tremendous excitement and we know that customers are eager to get their hands on one,” Craig McLennan, Regional Managing Director, North America, Research In Motion, said in an announcement.
The device boasts a 7-inch screen, 1 GHz processor and RIM’s BlackBerry Tablet OS. Earlier this year, RBC Capital analyst Mike Abramsky predicted RIM could sell 4 million PlayBooks during the remainder of 2011. The key demographics are early adopters and power users seeking speed and security.
[Barron’s]
Ed Sutherland is a veteran technology journalist who first heard of Apple when they grew on trees, Yahoo was run out of a Stanford dorm and Google was an unknown upstart. Since then, Sutherland has covered the whole technology landscape, concentrating on tracking the trends and figuring out the finances of large (and small) technology companies.
