RIM To Sell The BlackBerry PlayBook For Less Than $500

By Mauricio

So far pretty much everything is known about the BlackBerry PlayBook including specifications, versions, the operating system, capabilities and hardware. What we haven’t heard much of is what price tag the PlayBook will carry. During an interview in Seoul today, RIM Co-CEO Jim Balsillie outed the price:

Research In Motion Ltd., the maker of the BlackBerry smartphone, said it will begin selling a tablet computer in North America in the first quarter for “under” $500 as it takes on Apple Inc.’s iPad.

“The product will be very competitively priced,” Co-Chief Executive Officer Jim Balsillie said in an interview in Seoul today, declining to be more specific. Sales of the BlackBerry Playbook, unveiled in September, will expand globally from the second quarter, he said. The iPad starts at $499.

As a reminder, the PlayBook will be a seven-inch tablet powered by QNX, will have dual cameras, 1 GB of RAM with a 1 GHz dual-core processor, 16GB, 32GB or 64GB versions, HDMI output and more. Right now it’s unclear whether $500 will be the price regardless of hardware differences. With an expected availability of early 2011 in the United States and rollouts in other international markets in Q2, I’m sure we’ll start seeing a lot more of the BlackBerry PlayBook soon enough.

via Mashable & BusinessWeek