Laptop Thoughts: News & Reviews on Laptops, Netbooks, Slates, and More.

"We promised a hands on demo video of the BlackBerry PlayBook, and that's what you're going to get from us - almost 10 minutes of 1080p joy. As we said previously, we were pretty impressed seeing the PlayBook demo'd in person right in front of us, and well, we could go on for days."

The Playbook is looking like a real-deal competitor to the iPad - but only in terms of hardware. The harder piece is the ecosystem of developers making apps, and entertainment companies providing content. That's not an easy problem to solve...

Keeping in mind of course that this is a video from RIM, it's still hard to dismiss the differences shown in the video - the Playbook appears to handily beat the iPad in terms of browser performance. But performance isn't everything; it needs to be balanced off against battery life. The iPad has a single core Cortex A8 processor at 1 Ghz; the RIM Playbook has two cores, possibly based on the Cortex A9 processor. So while it performance faster, it might also chew through battery life faster - until the final specs are known, and independent battery tests can be performed, it's too early to make a call. Still, things are looking good for the RIM Playbook!