Breaking News: BlackBerry "PlayBook" Tablet launched at Developer Conference

By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla

It is called the PlayBook and it is RIM's new 7-inch tablet which features a  1GHz dual-core processor and integrates with user's existing BlackBerry accounts. The PlayBook can handle Flash 10.1 as well as HTML5 web standards as well as Adobe Air integration. Powered by QNX OS which highlights security and stability, the PlayBook is expected to be available in 2011. Video  and photos after the break.

RIM's CEO Mike Lazaridis took to the stage for the event keynote and began the proceedings by declaring some recent statistics pertinent to the BlackBerry maker.

To date 115 Million BlackBerry smartphones have been sold, there are also over 50 million worldwide subscribers to BlackBerry services. Claiming that BlackBerry is the no. 1 smartphone in North America, Lazaridis also noted that there were 250,000 plus active BlackBerry Enterprise Servers in deployment today.

As far as the popular BBM (BlackBerry Messenger) goes, Lazaridis was pleased to announce that the service has reached 28 million users. He followed up by talking abut the BlackBerry App World, which is RIM's smartphone app delivery platform which has 35 million users and facilitates over 1.5 million app downloads daily since its inception in 2009. Lazaridis also talked about BlackBerry WebWorks, a new development platform that's hinged on web technologies such as HTML5 with no Java necessary.