[james99]

With BlackBerry World 2011 coming to a close, you knew there had to be some unannounced news waiting to come out of the conference, right? We have been told by multiple sources that RIM is planning on releasing its followup to the BlackBerry PlayBook around the holidays this year. That’s clearly less than a year from the April launch of the original PlayBook — and the 4G versions aren’t even out yet — but there is a key differentiating factor here… the screen size. It’s entire possibly that RIM wants to play in both segments of the tablet market, and the PlayBook 2 could probably be thought of as an additional PlayBook model as opposed to the second-generation tablet. We have been told this tablet will be in the 10-inch range as opposed to the current model, which sports a 7-inch screen. The first model is selling pretty well according to some analysts, and a bigger version of the tablet along with an update OS that includes an email client, BBM and more could really hit the sweet spot. That’s all we have on the upcoming PlayBook 2, but hit the break for some details on BlackBerry OS 7.

 

[Hilman]

With the current PB being $600 for the 32 GB model, the new 10" models are going to be even more which could be a very bad thing for sales (like with the Xoom), once you start getting to $700-$800 per unit, you may as well stick with a laptop.

 

[scampbell]

Will 10" be necessarily cost more than 7"? With computer technology, often bigger is cheaper to make than smaller.

 

[Hilman]

Do you really think they will cost the same? How does that work with other things like TV's, phones, etc? When comparing tablet prices, why is it $100 more to go from 16 to 32 GB in memory when they are identical in every other way? (Answer, because they can charge more).

 

[james99]

They can't sell them for the same price (regardless of production costs) since we humans would naturally buy the larger one.

Hopefully the current model will go down in price and the new one will have other features (Micro SD, etc.)