Office supply store Staples will be offering some deep discounts for Black Friday this year. One of the best deals may be the BlackBerry PlayBook, which Staples will be selling for $199 and up the day after Thanksgiving.
For that price you’ll get a PlayBook tablet with 16GB of storage, 1GB of RAM, WiFi, Bluetooth, and front-and rear cameras.
The promotion runs from 6:00AM to noon on Friday, November 25th, and the price is only good in stores. But that’s about $100 off the current cheapest price for the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet. When RIM first launched tablet earlier this year, it sold for $499 and up.
The PlayBook features a 7 inch, 1024 x 600 pixel display, a 1 GHz TI OMAP4 dual core processor. It runs the BlackBerry Tablet OS — which is probably the weakest link at this point.
The platform has been off to a rough start, but Research in Motion plans to offer a major software update next year that will bring native email, calendar, and contact apps to the tablet and the ability to run many Android applications.
The PlayBook is manufactured by Taiwanese OEM Quanta — the same company sourced with making the Amazon Kindle Fire. The Kindle Fire has a list price of $199 — but it has half the RAM, no cameras, no Bluetooth, and only 8GB of storage.
Staples will also be offering the 32GB PlayBook for $249 and the 64GB model for $399 on Black Friday.
Other deals include:
- Acer Iconia Tab A500 for $299
- B&N Nook Color + $25 Staples gift card for $199
- Amazon Kindle + $15 Staples gift card for $79
- 16GB SanDisk Cruzer USB flash drive for $13
You can find the complete Staples Black Friday ad at BlackFriday.info.
Wait for the fire sale and you’ll be able to get these things dirt cheap. RIM is dying a slow death and has no answer how to fix it.
Too early to say since ICS is not available yet to put on a rooted device.
Can you root the playbook and install ICS?
That will most likely never happen. The PlayBook has a proprietary OS and devs won’t be able to get drivers for it, etc. . .
Don’t buy this thinking you can throw Android on it, though that would be awesome–I love the design and feel of the PlayBook.
However, The “Android App Player” for the PlayBook is available on the beta 2.0 OS which allows you to play many Android apps. . .Â
Drivers aren’t the issue, the RIM Playbook is just a TI OMAP 4 system. Just like the Amazon Kindle Fire, Archos Gen 9 tablets, etc.
Along with the fact the demonstrations of ICS were done on a TI OMAP, there should be no problems actually running ICS on the Playbook.
The problem is the mil spec security for the Playbook OS. It’ll be very hard to get around and root to then install another OS. The lack of a SD card reader makes it especially hard, but it is possible.