If you are desperate to get your hands on the upcoming BlackBerry Playbook tablet then the Carphone Warehouse may be able to help you. They have a new concessions store opened in Selfridges, London and you will be able to get your hands on the new tablet from Wednesday (15th June) 24 hours ahead of the official launch.
Visitors to the store who have a demo of the PlayBook will receive a goodie bag and the chance to win a PlayBook and a BlackBerry Torch. The PlayBook will also be available at Carphone Warehouse stores in Manchester Trafford Park, Bluewater Shopping Centre, Bristol Cribbs and London Westfield.
The Playbook is a 7” tablet with built in WiFi support and comes in 16Gb, 32Gb, and 64Gb options priced at around £399, £479 and £559, price wise it is a competitor for the iPad though it is a smaller screen. It boasts a 1Ghz dual core chip, 1GB of RAM and two cameras , a front 3 megapixel front facing camera and a 5 megapixel rear facing camera and an OS powered by QNX technology.
From the promo videos I have seen it looks a nice machine and there are plenty of apps available for it already. I doubt that we will see the queues and hysteria that surrounded the launch of the iPad 2 but being from BlackBerry there are enough BlackBerry fanboys out there to mean that the device has a chance of surviving in the already crowded tablet market.
Personally I’m undecided whether I want to invest in a PlayBook yet. The fact that you need a BlackBerry phone to tether it to the Internet is not ideal although I doubt I would ever really use it away from home as I usually take my iPad when I am on business. I’ll put some thought into it over these next couple of days and might invest.
Will you be going buying a PlayBook, let me know if you do and what you think of it.