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BlackBerry PlayBook still doesn’t have a confirmed release date or price here in the UK, but new video footage of RIM’s tablet in action has whetted our appetites for the device. It shows the PlayBook’s multi-tasking in action, along with several games.
The video was shot by VentureBeat at last week’s Game Developers’ Conference in San Francisco, as RIM’s Tyler Lessard showed off the 7-inch tablet.
Among the games demoed was a new version of EA’s Need for Speed, and a Flash game called Machinarium. Oh, and according to Lessard, an open-source version of Quake was up and running on the device within a week of the developers starting to port it.
Here’s the video:
The PlayBook certainly has the chops for decent gaming, despite the fact that a lot of RIM’s rhetoric around it has made it sound like a more business-focused tablet.
The 7-inch screen may be smaller than iPad and iPad 2, but it has a 1GHz dual-core processor inside to match the latter device, and an impressive 1GB of RAM — Apple is keeping mum about how much RAM is inside the iPad 2, but it’s thought to be 512MB at the most.
The multi-tasking looks very slick from this video too, flicking between different games with barely a pause. One thing that’s still not clear about the PlayBook is what impact its multi-tasking and 3D gaming will have on its battery life, though.
Reviewers haven’t been able to sit down with the tablet for longer than a few minutes at a time, but how long its juice lasts will be crucial for both corporate users and people attracted by its gaming potential.
For more on our first impressions of the BlackBerry PlayBook, read our hands-on test from its initial announcement last September.
