Blackberry Playbook

I have no illusions that the playbook will take a huge percentage of the tablet market, or even remotely come close to challenging the iPhone, but that doesn't mean it can't be a good business and a good product. I'm very interested in getting one.

I'll be a day one purchase if its performance is anything like what I've seen in the videos. I'd love to see Apple have to innovate a bit for their 2nd gen to compete.
 
Blackberry doesn't have much marketshare, yet Research in Motion recorded about twice the profit of Nokia. Could it be because they completely dominate the highly profitable business market? Note this is with 45% revenue growth in their last quarterly report, so they aren't exactly falling away.

Depends what market you are looking at. BB still has the #1 share of smartphones and generate more revenue for carriers than any other device. They are also the most secure option still.

There's no question that blackberry is facing increased competition in NA from Android and iPhone, but I don't think they are quite dead yet.

If nothing else, they'll have the government/security conscious market wrapped up for the foreseeable future. Things like iOS/Android/WP7 don't cut it in the security department atm.
 
RIM is something like 30-40% of the smartphone market in the USA and the number is dropping, but the total number of subscribers is increasing. It's still an extremely profitable business, even if it is a little more niche in terms of users. I have no illusions that the playbook will take a huge percentage of the tablet market, or even remotely come close to challenging the iPhone, but that doesn't mean it can't be a good business and a good product. I'm very interested in getting one.

I wouldn't really say that the BB is a niche market. I think it is more appropriate to look at it in terms of new submarkets within the smartphone market. android/iphone/WP7 isn't really moving into the BB market. There was a lot of analysis when Apple first released the iphone that it wasn't so much taking over the existing market for smartphones but creating whole new markets.
 
Wow... that video is exactly the kind of product demo I like to see from shows like this. Seriously impressive.
 
That's extremely impressive indeed. I noticed at 7:40 that the 3D demo on the right was very choppy until they made it fullscreen (i.e. presumably stopped rendering the other demos at the same time), but even that happens in a very smooth way (i.e. the rest of the interface and scrolling isn't slowed down one bit)!
 
Would it be too much to expect the 540 in that one to be clocked over 300MHz?
 
Question: I've never done any ActionScript development. Anyone know a good IDE for Mac? Seems you can't do it in Xcode. I'd like to make a playbook app. Flash Builder isn't free, and I'd prefer free. I'm not a huge fan of Eclipse, but I think it can do ActionScript 3 with the right plugins.
 
Would it be too much to expect the 540 in that one to be clocked over 300MHz?

Okay, so Lazy8s mysteriously said "OMAP4 it is, then." on the first page, and now you're saying that as well... I've heard rumor for OMAP4 elsewhere; does anyone have an actual source on this?
 
Well it's pretty obvious it's an Omap4430 how many other Cortex A9 SoCs are ready and the video confirms PowerVR so we know it's an SGX540. Not sure of the clock speed but I'm sure if Ailuros is hinting might not be far off.
 
How many other Cortex-A9 SoCs are ready? Tegra 2, obviously. Just because the video had it running IMG demos doesn't confirm that it uses IMG chips, unless it's confirmed they won't run on Tegra. I'm not trying to dispute the SoC, I'm just looking for the most concrete evidence possible I can present to show it isn't Tegra 2.
 
How many other Cortex-A9 SoCs are ready? Tegra 2, obviously. Just because the video had it running IMG demos doesn't confirm that it uses IMG chips, unless it's confirmed they won't run on Tegra. I'm not trying to dispute the SoC, I'm just looking for the most concrete evidence possible I can present to show it isn't Tegra 2.
as it is a imgtec demo it all almost certainly use PVRTC for textures
imgtec gpu cores are the only ones that supports PVRTC rite now
and the playbook has already been confirmed to have dual arm a9
1+1
=
omap4
 
How many other Cortex-A9 SoCs are ready? Tegra 2, obviously. Just because the video had it running IMG demos doesn't confirm that it uses IMG chips, unless it's confirmed they won't run on Tegra. I'm not trying to dispute the SoC, I'm just looking for the most concrete evidence possible I can present to show it isn't Tegra 2.

Well seeing in that demo how it runs the PVR demos it would be a cold day in hell when T2 would be able to run the shader views demo with that kind of performance and even more so with other 3D applications in parallel. SGX has a distinct advantage over the competition with post processing; there are two demos based on that on IMG's website.
 
Raytracing?
Is the windows demo actually doing raytracing?
I had that demo in my i8910 (Symbian^1), never imagined it was raytracing.
 
Ok and here comes the layman's dumb question: what has post processing with ray tracing in common?

The guy in the video says the windows demo is real time raytracing.

He could just be babbling marketing BS with no knowledge of raytracing whatsoever, though..
 
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