R

esearch In Motion (RIM), the maker of the BlackBerry smartphone, has high expectations that its newest product, the BlackBerry PlayBook, will woo the Indonesian market due to the great success of the BlackBerry in the country.

The company showed the tablet’s specifications and key features to reporters at a meeting Monday in a “Meet the PlayBook” bus at the Gelora Bung Karno Sports Complex in Central Jakarta.

During the meeting, RIM’s managing director for Southeast Asia, Gregory Wade, stated that the company was very optimistic about the Indonesian market.

“Our research shows that Indonesia is a market that is becoming tablet savvy and is very interested in consuming multimedia tablets,” he said.

RIM estimates that currently there are 145 million users worldwide, although the company did not provide a country by country breakdown.

However, Wade could not inform attendees of the availability or pricing of the tablet for the Indonesian market.

“We will keep you up to date later,” he said.

According to Wade, the BlackBerry PlayBook would be launched later this year in Indonesia.

In Canada and the US, he added, RIM launched three types of PlayBook at different prices — those with 16 GB of data storage are priced at US$499, 32 GB at $599 and 64 GB at $699.

The Waterloo, Ontario, Canada-based company launched the tablet in Canada and the US on April 19.

When asked about after-sales service for Indonesian customers, Wade said the company was still working it out.

Weighing 425 grams and equipped with a 7-inch LCD, PlayBook runs on the QNX operating system and is equipped with 1 GHz dual-core processor, 1 GB RAM and symmetric multi-processing that enables it to run several applications at the same time.

The tablet, the battery of which lasts up to seven hours, is also equipped with a 5-mega pixel camera on the back and 3-mega pixel camera on the front, 1080p HD video and mini USB and micro HDMI ports.

Furthermore, it comes with the BlackBerry Bridge application to connect with BlackBerry smartphones using a secure Bluetooth connection. This way, users are able to securely view email, Personal Information Manager (PIM) and BlackBerry Message (BBM) contents from their smartphones.

Wade said the company envisaged that PlayBook would be attractive to both existing customers and new ones. He said existing users could extend their BlackBerry smartphone experience on a larger 7-inch screen.

Meanwhile, those who are new to the BlackBerry platform might want “a super powerful and ultra-portable tablet that delivers users with uncompromised Web browsing and multi-tasking capabilities”.

The tablet market suddenly rebounded when Apple Inc. launched its iPad in April 2010, followed by iPad 2 in March 2011. The iPad uses a larger 10-inch screen and is available in two versions, those connected to Wi-Fi and those connected to the GSM network.

Other computer makers followed suit, such as Dell Streak with a smaller 5-inch display, Motorola Xoom and Samsung Galaxy. Most tablet makers use the Google Android operating system. (msa)