RIM officially announced today something that has already been speculated for a while now: the fact that the BlackBerry PlayBook slate will run Android 2.3. The move comes as we learn that the tablet will also run legacy BlackBerry apps. Meanwhile, the Android apps will have to use a dedicated run-time environment on the PlayBook.
This decision will bring thousands of apps to the RIM slate, quickly populating the device with software. The only catch is that developers will have to make ports and resubmissions to the BlackBerry App World. This certainly looks like RIM is shopping for developers in the Google camp, but it may be harmless cooperation after all.
The dual core slate with a 4G version on the way won’t have anything to do with Honeycomb, according to RIM co-Ceo Jim Balsillie, who also explained that Android apps won’t run as good as native apps on the PlayBook.
