The PlayBook three times faster than the iPad?

Jim Balsillie, co-CEO of RIM, has continued his crusade in pushing the qualities of his future PlayBook tactile tablet by comparing it against the current product of reference, Apple’s iPad.

The BlackBerry PlayBook won’t be available before the first quarter of 2011 in the United States, but there is already a lot of work going on behind the scenes pushing its qualities compared to the Apple iPad, a device which has already had millions of examples shipped.

Jim Balsillie, co-CEO of Research in Motion (RIM) hasn’t held back in comparing his product to Apple’s tactile tablet, involuntarily stating that the competition was out of date, something which he has previously stated for the iPhone.

He also pushed the performance of the PlayBook during the Web 2.0 event in San Francisco by stating that its was three time faster than the iPad tablet thanks to its ARM Cortex-A9 dual core processor (while the iPad uses an optimised processor but one that still belongs to the previous generation ARM Cortex-A8 family).


Is the La PlayBook a racehorse?
To prove this statement, a comparative video has been published, putting forward different ergonomic aspects of the two tablets. Jim Balsillie, while recognising the importance of mobile applications, has also suggested that these shouldn’t hide a bad web browsing experience, but should instead lead to changes.

The video should be taken with a grain of salt as it compares a 7" display with a dual core ARM Cortex-A9 process against a tablet with a 10" screen and single core ARM Cortex-A8 processor which is two generations removed. We can at least see the performance improvements in a real environment.

The remark was made while especially pushing the support of Adobe Flash on the PlayBook, which is not available on the iPad. Jim Balsillie also made it known that the NFC technology (Near Field Communication) could soon be present on their tablet and Smartphone’s, following behind Nokia’s declaration for Symbian and Google for Android.