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BlackBerry PlayBook available for pre-order; Available April

The BlackBerry PlayBook will go on sale in mid-April and is available to pre-order on Best Buy, while to be widely available on AT&T and Sprint.
Written by Zack Whittaker, Contributor

The long awaited BlackBerry PlayBook is now available for pre-order, with expected stock in stores from April 19th, announced a few hours ago on the Best Buy website.

We discovered earlier in the month that the FCC had approved three models, a 16GB, 32GB and 64GB models in line with the iPad 2 range of models.

The PlayBook with Wi-Fi will be $499, $599 and $699 respectively.

The 7-inch 1024x600 display device will include a 1Ghz dual core processor, 1GB of RAM, and yet is only half an inch thick and under a pound in weight.

The PlayBook is designed for not only the consumer market, but primarily with the enterprise client in mind. For the life of me I cannot understand why a BlackBerry smartphone must be tethered to the PlayBook to access corporate emails, I do not know.

However, the PlayBook will support all the required enterprise-level security that currently exists on the BlackBerry smartphone, while selling as a powerful competitor to the iPad.

The PlayBook will include a 'personal mode' which allows a secure computing experience for personal use. It also includes BlackBerry Bridge which allows secure access to email and BlackBerry contentby tethering to your smartphone.

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BlackBerry Balance, however, will allow users to bring work and personal content together on-screen in a unified and seamless setting, while maintaining security and keeping applications and work separate.

The Motorola Xoom and the iPad 2 both went on sale last month, and have larger screens than the PlayBook. Whether the PlayBook can compete with a lucrative tablet market so late in the game, we just have to hope that the BlackBerry following is as diverse and as strong as that of Apple's.

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