BlackBerry PlayBook

In our Black Friday roundup, we noted that a handful of retailers will be offering the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet for prices as low as $199.99 on the day after Thanksgiving. But some stores aren’t waiting.

A number of electronics chains in Canada are already offering deep discounts on the tablet, and today Best Buy and Buy.com started offering the PlayBook for $199 and up.

Update: Walmart and Newegg are also selling PlayBooks for $198 and $199.99 respectively.

Best Buy already appears to be out of stock for the cheap tablets online, and Buy.com has sold out of $199.99 tablets with 16GB of storage. But you can still get a 32GB model from Buy.com for $299.99 or a 64GB BlackBerry tablet for $399.99.

The BlackBerry PlayBook has a 7 inch, 1024 x 600 pixel display, a 1 GHz TI OMAP4 processor, and runs the BlackBerry Tablet OS based on QNX software. While there still aren’t as many third party apps available for BlackBerry Tablet OS as Android or iOS, there’s a public beta version of OS 2.0 which will allow you to run many Android apps. The full version of the software update will be released in early 2012.

The PlayBook hardware is very similar to what you get with a $199 Amazon Kindle Fire. Both tablets are manufactured by Taiwanese OEM Quanta.

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5 replies on “BlackBerry PlayBook tablet goes on sale for $200 and up”

  1. If RIM Does a $99 sale, I’ll buy one. But as far as I am concerned, the HP Touchpad(dead) is still a better buy then this thing.

    1. Not really fair comparing it to a already dead product. Remember the HP did cost more when it was still a active product.

      Anyway, the $199 is already a at loss price for the Playbook.  Parts costs for the 16GB model have been estimated to cost about $273.  So is an even better deal for the hardware than the Kindle Fire, which barely costs over $200 for the hardware cost and gives you noticeably fewer hardware features than the Playbook.

      The main issue is whether RIM can continue support and whether they can get the 2.0 update out in February, pushed back from the original suggested November release.

      The 2.0 update promises to fix many of the issues but RIM may have to consider unlocking the bootloader if they want the Playbook to survive.  While the regular price is unlikely to drop below $299, occasional sale deals aside, for permanent pricing unless they give up and do a fire sale.

  2. Hmmmm!!  I just bot one at Buy dot com and they were in stock; it seems.

  3. On Nov 20, Newegg and Walmart also are offering the $199 deal for the 16GB Playbook.

  4. FYI
    BestBuy has the PlayBook price back to normal. Apparently it only lasted till 6AM eastern, or there about.

    I keep thinking about getting one of these–the browser is the best out of any tablet from what I’ve tested, works flawlessly with Google apps (desktop versions) though, it is a little slow.

    The problem I have is, what will RIM do with BBX. The OS 2.0 for the PlayBook seems to be going in a pure webOS direction–I don’t really care for webOS on the TouchPad and think the moves RIM are making to the PB UI are bad mainly for the following reason, they seem to be copying other platforms instead of doing research to see how people really use a tablet and innovating with that information–this seems to be an issue with all tablets at the moment.

    Use any current tablet and see how often you have to remove a hand from holding the tablet in order to navigate around the tablet. I have to give MS credit, from what I’ve seen they seem to have done research on how people hold and use a tablet and put controls in areas where you won’t have to remove a hand to access stuff. Android seems to be going more for an overall look while iOS is just using a phone os. RIM did some very unique things with the PlayBook UI 1.x and it works very well for a 7″ form factor, not sure about larger sizes. So, it’s a little sad to see them deinovating the UI just to mimic others. 

    Nonetheless, even though the PB is a little dated it does run very smooth and can output 1080p while doing other tasking. . . . that’s not something any other tablet can claim.

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