BlackBerry PlayBook hands-on, impressions

We just met up with Research In Motion for a pretty detailed look at the upcoming BlackBerry PlayBook, and, in addition to getting a comprehensive walkthrough of the tablet on video, we also scored some photos. We weren’t allowed to touch the device, but were able to get a very good sense of the product, and wanted to share some of our impressions:

• The entire experience we saw was fluid, quick, and downright impressive. Apps opened and closed instantly, browsing through long lists like photos or music data was fast and effortless.
• Unfortunately there was no Wi-Fi in the secret room we checked out the device in, and we weren’t able to see the browser in action for ourselves.
• The multitasking on here is incredibly slick — in addition to flicking up from the touch sensitive bezel (we’re told all four bezels are touch sensitive) you can flick apps away to close them, flick left and right to switch apps, and flight from the right bezel to enter into an almost Palm-esque card view which shows apps near full screen.
• RIM played back some 1080p video for us which looked absolutely amazing on the 7-inch tablet. In addition to being able to multitask applications, the device will let you bounce out of a playing video into another application, and have your video playing in the background for you to come back to. You can obviously stop the video and enter into another application, but in the demo we got RIM left it playing, and we really got a sense for how powerful and fast the device OS and hardware is — nothing stuttered or was out of bounds.

We have the video uploading now and will have it posted soon, but in the meantime check out some photos of the BlackBerry PlayBook!