BlackBerry Playbook gets a Mini Keyboard

14 March 2012

£80 to turn your tablet into a laptop and boost the battery

The BlackBerry PlayBook continues its fightback. Less than a month after the launch of the PlayBook 2.0 operating system, the tablet now has another interesting little selling feature - the Mini Keyboard.

Except this isn't just a keyboard. But that's probably its prime use, especially as RIM obviously knows its customers are partial to a bit of keyboard action. This one effectively turns your tablet into a laptop, should you want to do such a thing. Maybe that long work presentation will just be a little easier to compoase with some old school QWERTY keys.

So that's the big selling point here, but not the only one. The BlackBerry Mini Keyboard also comes with an additional battery, which gives you an extra 30 days of power. No, that's not an error. We didn't mean minutes of hours, we really did mean days. Going away? This should be just the job.

Finally, there's a Citrix receiver built-in, so if you have a Citrix account, you can remotely access your compuiter desktop from the PlayBook. Once in (and if you are using Windows), you can access everything there, using traditional keyboard shortcuts to get around too. Also, as a cherry on the top, there's a micro HDMI port for connecting to a bigger screen.

With the recent updates to the operating system and this, it does look like RIM is really pushing hard at making the PlayBook a business tool in the same way as the BlackBerry phone is perceived. Not a bad idea really, especially as prices these days are pretty affordable too. The Carphone Warehouse has recently re-priced the 16GB, 32GB and 64GB editions of the PlayBook at £169, £199 and £249.

As for the Mini Keyboard, that will cost you around £80 in the UK.

Source: Recombu