RIM Unveils The BlackBerry PlayBook

New Professional-Grade Tablet Deliv­ers Unmatched Power and Web Performance

San Fran­cisco, CA – Black­Berry DEVCON 2010 — Research In Motion (RIM) (NASDAQ: RIMM; TSX: RIM) today rede­fined the pos­si­bil­i­ties for mobile com­put­ing with the unveil­ing of its new professional-grade Black­Berry® Play­Book™ tablet and Black­Berry® Tablet OS.

Per­fect for either large orga­ni­za­tions or an “army of one”, the Black­Berry Play­Book is designed to give users what they want, includ­ing uncom­pro­mised web brows­ing, true mul­ti­task­ing and high per­for­mance mul­ti­me­dia, while also pro­vid­ing advanced secu­rity fea­tures, out-of-the-box enter­prise sup­port and a break­through devel­op­ment plat­form for IT depart­ments and devel­op­ers. The incred­i­bly pow­er­ful and inno­v­a­tive Black­Berry Play­Book is truly a game-changing prod­uct in the grow­ing tablet marketplace.

“RIM set out to engi­neer the best professional-grade tablet in the indus­try with cutting-edge hard­ware fea­tures and one of the world’s most robust and flex­i­ble oper­at­ing sys­tems,” said Mike Lazaridis, Pres­i­dent and Co-CEO at Research In Motion. “The Black­Berry Play­Book solidly hits the mark with indus­try lead­ing power, true mul­ti­task­ing, uncom­pro­mised web brows­ing and high per­for­mance multimedia.”

The Tablet You’ll Want to Take Every­where
This beau­ti­fully designed and incred­i­bly pow­er­ful tablet is ultra portable, ultra thin and super con­ve­nient for both work and play. Mea­sur­ing less than half an inch thick and weigh­ing less than a pound, the Black­Berry Play­Book fea­tures a vivid 7” high res­o­lu­tion dis­play that looks and feels great in your hand. With such a unique mix of util­ity, per­for­mance and porta­bil­ity, you’ll want to take it everywhere.

The New Bench­mark in Tablet Per­for­mance
At its heart, the Black­Berry Play­Book is a mul­ti­task­ing pow­er­house. Its ground­break­ing per­for­mance is jointly fueled by a 1 GHz dual-core proces­sor and the new Black­Berry Tablet OS which sup­ports true sym­met­ric mul­ti­pro­cess­ing. Together, the abun­dant pro­cess­ing power and highly sophis­ti­cated OS enable the Black­Berry Play­Book to pro­vide users with true mul­ti­task­ing and a highly-responsive and fluid touch screen expe­ri­ence for apps and con­tent services.

Uncom­pro­mised Web Brows­ing
With sup­port for Adobe® Flash® Player 10.1, Adobe® Mobile AIR® and HTML-5, the Black­Berry Play­Book pro­vides cus­tomers with an uncom­pro­mised, high-fidelity web expe­ri­ence and offers them the abil­ity to enjoy all of the sites, games and media on the web. For more than a decade, the mobile indus­try has worked to bridge the gap between the “real web” and mobile devices through var­i­ous apps and tech­nolo­gies and, in fact, a sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of mobile apps today still sim­ply serve as a proxy for web con­tent that already exists on the web. The Black­Berry Play­Book closes that gap and brings the real, full web expe­ri­ence to mobile users while also open­ing new and more excit­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties for devel­op­ers and con­tent publishers.

High Per­for­mance Mul­ti­me­dia
The Black­Berry Play­Book fea­tures pre­mium mul­ti­me­dia fea­tures to sup­port high-quality mobile expe­ri­ences. It includes dual HD cam­eras for video cap­ture and video con­fer­enc­ing that can both record HD video at the same time, and an HDMI-out port for pre­sent­ing one’s cre­ations on exter­nal dis­plays. The Black­Berry Play­Book also offers rich stereo sound and a media player that rivals the best in the industry.

Black­Berry Inte­gra­tion
For those Black­Berry Play­Book users who carry a Black­Berry smart­phone*, it will also be pos­si­ble to pair their tablet and smart­phone using a secure Blue­tooth® con­nec­tion. This means they can opt to use the larger tablet dis­play to seam­lessly and securely view any of the email, BBM™, cal­en­dar, tasks, doc­u­ments and other con­tent that resides on (or is acces­si­ble through) their smart­phone. They can also use their tablet and smart­phone inter­change­ably with­out wor­ry­ing about sync­ing or dupli­cat­ing data. This secure inte­gra­tion of Black­Berry tablets and smart­phones is a par­tic­u­larly use­ful fea­ture for those busi­ness users who want to leave their lap­top behind.

Enter­prise Ready
Thanks to the seam­less and secure Blue­tooth pair­ing expe­ri­ence and the highly secure under­ly­ing OS archi­tec­ture, the Black­Berry Play­Book is enter­prise ready and com­pat­i­ble (out-of-the-box) with Black­Berry® Enter­prise Server. When con­nected over Blue­tooth, the smart­phone con­tent is view­able on the tablet, but the con­tent actu­ally remains stored on the Black­Berry smart­phone and is only tem­porar­ily cached on the tablet (and sub­ject to IT pol­icy con­trols). With this approach to infor­ma­tion secu­rity, IT depart­ments can deploy the Black­Berry Play­Book to employ­ees out-of-the-box with­out wor­ry­ing about all the secu­rity and man­age­abil­ity issues that arise when cor­po­rate data is stored on yet another device.

QNX Neu­trino Reli­a­bil­ity
The Black­Berry Tablet OS is built upon the QNX® Neu­trino® micro­ker­nel archi­tec­ture, one of the most reli­able, secure and robust oper­at­ing sys­tem archi­tec­tures in the world. Neu­trino has been field hard­ened for years and is being used to sup­port mission-critical appli­ca­tions in every­thing from planes, trains and auto­mo­biles to med­ical equip­ment and the largest core routers that run the Inter­net.  The new Black­Berry Tablet OS lever­ages and builds upon the many proven strengths of this QNX Neu­trino archi­tec­ture to sup­port a pro­fes­sional grade tablet expe­ri­ence and to rede­fine the pos­si­bil­i­ties for mobile computing.

An OS Built for Devel­op­ers
The Neu­trino based micro­ker­nel archi­tec­ture in the Black­Berry Tablet OS deliv­ers excep­tional per­for­mance, high scal­a­bil­ity, Com­mon Cri­te­ria EAL 4+ secu­rity, and sup­port for indus­try stan­dard tools that are already famil­iar to hun­dreds of thou­sands of devel­op­ers.  The OS is fully POSIX com­pli­ant enabling easy porta­bil­ity of C-based code, sup­ports Open GL for 2D and 3D graph­ics inten­sive appli­ca­tions like gam­ing, and will run appli­ca­tions built in Adobe Mobile AIR as well as the new Black­Berry® Web­Works™ app plat­form announced today (which will allow apps to be writ­ten to run on Black­Berry Play­Book tablets as well as Black­Berry smart­phones with Black­Berry® 6). The Black­Berry Tablet OS will also sup­port Java enabling devel­op­ers to eas­ily bring their exist­ing Black­Berry 6 Java appli­ca­tions to the Black­Berry Tablet OS envi­ron­ment.
Key fea­tures and spec­i­fi­ca­tions of the Black­Berry Play­Book include:

• 7” LCD, 1024 x 600, WSVGA, capac­i­tive touch screen with full multi-touch and ges­ture sup­port
• Black­Berry Tablet OS with sup­port for sym­met­ric mul­ti­pro­cess­ing
• 1 GHz dual-core proces­sor
• 1 GB RAM
• Dual HD cam­eras (3 MP front fac­ing, 5 MP rear fac­ing), sup­ports 1080p HD video record­ing
• Video play­back: 1080p HD Video, H.264, MPEG, DivX, WMV
• Audio play­back: MP3, AAC, WMA
• HDMI video out­put
• Wi-Fi — 802.11 a/b/g/n
• Blue­tooth 2.1 + EDR
• Con­nec­tors: micro­HDMI, microUSB, charg­ing con­tacts
• Open, flex­i­ble appli­ca­tion plat­form with sup­port for WebKit/HTML-5, Adobe Flash Player 10.1, Adobe Mobile AIR, Adobe Reader, POSIX, OpenGL, Java
• Ultra thin and portable:
o Mea­sures 5.1”x7.6”x0.4” (130mm x 193mm x 10mm)
o Weighs less than a pound (approx­i­mately 0.9 lb or 400g)
• Addi­tional fea­tures and spec­i­fi­ca­tions of the Black­Berry Play­Book will be shared on or before the date this prod­uct is launched in retail out­lets.
• RIM intends to also offer 3G and 4G mod­els in the future.

Avail­abil­ity
The Black­Berry Play­Book is expected to be avail­able in retail out­lets and other chan­nels in the United States in early 2011 with roll­outs in other inter­na­tional mar­kets begin­ning in (cal­en­dar) Q2.

RIM will begin work­ing with devel­op­ers and select cor­po­rate cus­tomers next month to begin devel­op­ment and early test­ing efforts.

The Black­Berry Tablet OS SDK is planned for release in the com­ing weeks and devel­op­ers can reg­is­ter for early access at www.blackberry.com/developers/tabletos.

For more infor­ma­tion, visit www.blackberry.com/playbook.

*Blue­tooth sup­port required.

About Research In Motion
Research In Motion (RIM), a global leader in wire­less inno­va­tion, rev­o­lu­tion­ized the mobile indus­try with the intro­duc­tion of the Black­Berry® solu­tion in 1999. Today, Black­Berry prod­ucts and ser­vices are used by mil­lions of cus­tomers around the world to stay con­nected to the peo­ple and con­tent that mat­ter most through­out their day. Founded in 1984 and based in Water­loo, Ontario, RIM oper­ates offices in North Amer­ica, Europe, Asia Pacific and Latin Amer­ica. RIM is listed on the NASDAQ Stock Mar­ket (NASDAQ: RIMM) and the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX: RIM). For more infor­ma­tion, visit www.rim.com or www.blackberry.com.
Forward-looking state­ments in this news release are made pur­suant to the “safe har­bor” pro­vi­sions of the U.S. Pri­vate Secu­ri­ties Lit­i­ga­tion Reform Act of 1995 and applic­a­ble Cana­dian secu­ri­ties laws.  When used herein, words such as “expect”, “antic­i­pate”, “esti­mate”,  “may”,  “will”, “should”, “intend,” “believe”, and sim­i­lar expres­sions, are intended to iden­tify forward-looking state­ments.  Forward-looking state­ments are based on esti­mates and assump­tions made by RIM in light of its expe­ri­ence and its per­cep­tion of his­tor­i­cal trends, cur­rent con­di­tions and expected future devel­op­ments, as well as other fac­tors that RIM believes are appro­pri­ate in the cir­cum­stances.  Many fac­tors could cause RIM’s actual results, per­for­mance or achieve­ments to dif­fer mate­ri­ally from those expressed or implied by the forward-looking state­ments, includ­ing those described in the “Risk Fac­tors” sec­tion of RIM’s Annual Infor­ma­tion Form, which is included in its Annual Report on Form 40-F (copies of which fil­ings may be obtained at www.sedar.com or www.sec.gov).  These fac­tors should be con­sid­ered care­fully, and read­ers should not place undue reliance on RIM’s forward-looking state­ments.  RIM has no inten­tion and under­takes no oblig­a­tion to update or revise any forward-looking state­ments, whether as a result of new infor­ma­tion, future events or oth­er­wise, except as required by law.

The Black­Berry and RIM fam­i­lies of related marks, images and sym­bols are the exclu­sive prop­er­ties and trade­marks of Research In Motion Lim­ited.  RIM, Research In Motion and Black­Berry are reg­is­tered with the U.S. Patent and Trade­mark Office and may be pend­ing or reg­is­tered in other coun­tries. Wi-Fi is a reg­is­tered trade­mark of the Wi-Fi Alliance. All other brands, prod­uct names, com­pany names, trade­marks and ser­vice marks are the prop­er­ties of their respec­tive own­ers. RIM assumes no oblig­a­tions or lia­bil­ity and makes no rep­re­sen­ta­tion, war­ranty, endorse­ment or guar­an­tee in rela­tion to any aspect of any third party prod­ucts or services.