Well... they fixed the name....

     Blackberry did what everyone expected today, but with a much better name than we all thought. Mike Lazaridis came on stage at the BlackBerry press conference and released the BlackBerry PlayBook. The name is instantly better than the "BlackPad" that was rumored, and appears to have a slew of features no one expected, including a nice looking FaceTime clone.

     "This is going to be an incredible gaming platform for publishers and the players." Lazaridis also called the slate "the first professional tablet," and "an amplified view of what's already on your BlackBerry." They seem to want to market it to the Pro market as always, but it looks like they've listened to what the iPad market was complaining about. Things like:

• Front Facing camer (not on iPad)
• HDMI Out (not on iPad)
• USB Connections (Not on iPad)
• 4G support is promised by the time the device launches (Always been an issue with the poor Apple networks)

     I'm much more excited than I figured I'd be about this, however...... They need a decent App store, and a great public SDK (Software Development Kit) to make people build applications for this. This has always been BlackBerries biggest FailPoint, and its something Android and Apple have already fixed. To date, Apple has 2 Million+ apps available. Android has 10 thousand. BlackBerry has 2000. They need to get developers running on this new platform and building quality apps. Once I get some decent App support, I'd have no issue shelling out the 800 bucks they'll be asking