14 DAY TRIAL // Sprint BlackBerry PlayBook has just made its way into the shelves and can now be purchased via all direct ship sales channels of the carrier, including Sprint's webstore.
Wi-Fi BlackBerry PlayBook can be purchased from Sprint starting today for $499.99 without any additional services or contract.
Although Sprint confirmed since January, that it will carry the PlayBook starting this summer, the tablet was tipped to be available on Sunday by Gerald Evans, a Sprint public-sector market director for the Midwest region, who posted the news on his blog on June 2.
The next day, Sprint officially confirmed that the tablet will hit shelves on June 5, thus confirming Evans post, which was removed in the meantime.
The Wi-Fi BlackBerry PlayBook measures 130 x 194 x 10 mm and runs BlackBerry Tablet OS, which is built on user-friendly QNX technology.
Equipped with a dual-core 1 GHz Cortex-A9 processor (PowerVR SGX540 GPU), RIM's PlayBook packs 1GB RAM and 16GB of internal memory but no addition microSD card slot for memory expansion.
This is one of the first Android tablets to provide symmetric multiprocessing, thus offering users true multitasking.
The tablet has a 7-inch TFT multi-touch capacitive display with 16 million colors support and 600 x 1024 pixels resolution.
Other highlights of the PlayBook include a 5-megapixel main camera with autofocus, a 3-megapixel front facing camera, Adobe Flash 10.1 support, built-in support for HTML 5, as well as support for video calling.
In addition, those who also own a BlackBerry smartphone can benefit from BlackBerry Bridge, a feature that allows users to wirelessly connect their BlackBerry smartphone to the BlackBerry PlayBook over Bluetooth.
BlackBerry Bridge is available as a free download on BlackBerry App World and will be supported on BlackBerry smartphones running Blackberry 5.0 OS or newer.
On related news, Sprint also plans to launch a 4G version of the BlackBerry PlayBook, but no further details have been disclosed.
