RIM has been having a hard time as of lately. With their services going down all over the world and their market share plummeting, it looks as if there’s no light at the end of the tunnel. RIM released the PlayBook tablet earlier this year. The tablet had a lot of promise, but poor marketing; pricing and little to no application support meant it would eventually be a commercial failure. However RIM isn’t planning on going down without a fight and this week they’ve announced the PlayBook 2.0 Developer beta and Runtime. The new beta is all set to be released today and includes a host of features that should have made into the PlayBook upon the time of its release.
The first feature included is BlackBerry Runtime for Android Apps and the BlackBerry Plug-In for Android Development Tools. What this means is that developers will now be able to bring their Android applications to the PlayBook. RIM has been talking about this for a long time and it seems finally we’ll be able to see something concrete. Also included is support for Flash Player 11, Adobe Air and WebGL. Flash as we all know is an integral part of the web and pretty much every website makes some use of it in one way or another.
PlayBook users will finally be able to view the web in its full glory, which had so far only been limited to Android tablets. Adobe Air is a technology from Adobe used to create applications. There’re a lot of applications on the Android Market that are built using Adobe Air and they’re quite good applications too, and if developers are to bring Android apps to the PlayBook, this was one of the tools they needed. WebGL is a new technology that enables the browser to show hardware accelerated 3D graphics. Needless to say this is a very interesting technology and something we can’t wait to put our hands on.
PlayBook has some fierce competition from the likes of iPad 2 and Honeycomb tablets and up till now it was wilting under the heat. However with these new changes to the OS, RIM hopes to turn the PlayBook into a real competitor in the tablet world. Only time will tell if this move pays off or not.
