The Forgotten Tablet: 2011 BlackBerry PlayBook

November 15, 2021 Luisa Rey

Not only smartphones and mobile phones are coming back into the collective memory with our section ‘The forgotten phone’ and ‘The forgotten smartphone’. We now add a tablet. Do you remember the BlackBerry PlayBook?

BlackBerry PlayBook

Parent company Research in Motion released its own tablet in 2011; the BlackBerry PlayBook. It was a special tablet, with the focus on the business user. This tablet was equipped with a 7.0 inch touchscreen with fairly large screen edges and a partially rubberized housing. The TFT screen shows a resolution of 1024 x 600 pixels.

It was the first device with BlackBerry’s Tablet OS, which was based on the QNX Neutrino platform. Applications could be downloaded via BlackBerry App World; so not via the Google Play Store. The supply was limited and the apps that were available were often paid. However, you got the most out of the tablet if you as a user also had a BlackBerry smartphone. This added extra functionality: BlackBerry Bridge. For example, it was possible to synchronize your agenda, mail and BBM (BlackBerry Messenger) with your BlackBerry smartphone via Bluetooth. A handy feature was that you could also quickly undo this at the push of a button, if you wanted to show the tablet to someone else, for example. The BlackBerry PlayBook had WiFi, but could also use the internet connection of your smartphone through a Bluetooth connection.

BlackBerry Playbook back cover

If we look at the further specifications of the BlackBerry tablet, we see the presence of a TI OMAP 4430 dual-core processor. This was assisted by 1GB of RAM. BlackBerry released the device with 16, 32 and 64GB of memory. You couldn’t expand this. There was also a 3 megapixel front camera and a 5 megapixel rear camera, assisted by an LED flash. The battery capacity was 5300 mAh. The price of the BlackBerry PlayBook started at around 450-500 euros. Later the price was lowered, because the sales numbers were disappointing.