Yesterday I put together a round up post of Black Friday deals. While not all the deals were good, there were a few that made me seriously consider getting up early on Friday. One of those deals was the Blackberry Playbook. It is going to sell for $200 at a couple stores, and that’s a significant discount from the $500 retail.
But today I learned that a number of stores have already marked it down to $200. If you’ve been thinking about getting RIM’s 7″ tablet, here’s your chance.
Walmart and Buy.com had the Playbook listed this morning, with all models on sale. But they are also in the process of selling out of the tablets, so I don’t know if you’ll be able to get one. But if you want one, it’s still worth looking. The higher priced models are still available at Buy.com, and they are also heavily discounted.
The Playbook is a 7″ tablet running RIM’s own QNX operating system. It is more or less a Blackberry tablet, and it has Wifi, Bluetooth, and it’s running on a dual core 1GHz Texas Instruments CPU. Thsi tablet has not had much market success since it was launched earlier this year, which is probably why it is on sale.
Now, before you shell out your money, I have to tell you that’s not a very good price. You can get the Kindle Fire for $200, or if you’re really desperate for a tablet you could get the Kobo Vox for the same price (why would you want to?). The Playbook has specs similar to the Kindle Fire, with the major difference being that the Playbook doesn’t have as useful of an OS or as many available apps.
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Months ago, that $200 price was tempting. But in the interim, I keep thinking, WTF would I *use* it for? $200 is too much just to view the web and to get access to so few apps as to make it little more than a web viewer anyway.
That frikkin Craig 7″ tablet is back on sale again, at Rite Aid this time, for $88. Along with its 7″ netbook (cough) sibling.
Cane,
have you ever bought a Android tablet?
The Coby Kryos Gingerbread tablet with 800MHz CPU runs $110.
No hacking needed.
Plent of other, similar generic choices for web surfing and ebook reading.
He blew it. He could have had a nice little ebook reader and general purpose tablet from Woot at 170 bucks: Samsung Galaxy S Wifi 5
I would like to mention that as of the Sunday Target advertisement you can get the B&N Nook Simple Touch for $99 with a $30 gift vs Bestbuy’s Black Friday price of $79. So the sales are starting early this year?
The price for Blackberry tablet is tempting, and the hardware is definitely better than the Kindle Fire – real Bluetooth for example. However I had a look through the RIM developer site and it seems a real mess, with no access to any of the hardcore goodness that QNX apparently offers. Pity, I’d have been keen to play with it.
Its true the QNX os is not mature yet. They are late with the update but it is coming.
I’m currently running 2.0 beta and have plenty of Android apps, not to mention apps are still coming to App World. Playing Dead Space HD on PB is amazing.
Seriously, the Kindle fire is a nice started device. Who cares about content when the fire has 6gb storage useable LOL! No Bluetooth, Cams, mics, HDMI out, Blackberry bridge for BB phone owners, flash 10.3 to watch my favorite shows online etc.
The fire is a kids toy tablet compared to PB. You say PB at $199 is a bad price!!!
Rediculous article. The Nook can be rooted at least.
My 2 cents…and I am an iPhone user who hates blackberry phones. PB will mature with ios, and I could care less who sells the most.
The price is right at $199.
Cane,
if you think a Playbook is only good as a web viewer you really don’t know much about the device. It can do much more than just view web…1080p recording, plug it into your flatscreen, real multitasking, better performance all around, Android apps coming shortly (I couldn’t wait so I’m already using many right now. Never was a big fandroid since I have been an ios user since it showed up but I have to admit christmas came early for me and I started using my Playbook right away. Sweet device. Took me a few hours to get used to it and now and don’t search for the home button anymore lol. Also, as far as content, I have plenty of movies and music to load onto it so I guess it will vary user to user. I know I’ll enjoy plenty of content with it. Did I mention it can be used like a usb card to store files and that using my hotmail on the web (one click access) works just fine on my PB, allowing me to attach files that exist on my device.
I guess what I’m saying is for $199 thats more than enough to make me happy. The web is full of post full of trash talking competitor devices and their users and it makes me think, wow are many people technology spoilt these days lol.
I hope all you boys and girls will enjoy any new devices you get over the holidays…be it iPads, Nooks, Touchads, Kindles, Playbooks etc.
Hohoho…
D
RIM Drops the Price of the PlayBook to $199 - The Digital Reader // Feb 2, 2012 at 1:50 pm
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