Research in Motion has placed orders for one million Blackberry PlayBook tablets for the first quarter of 2011. Since the company only intends to start selling its slate-type PCs in March, the size of order may mean that the firm intends to sell one million Playbook devices in one month.

RIM Blackberry Playbook is to be manufactured by Quanta Computer initially, according to a news-story by DigiTimes web-site. The contract maker of electronics has already started making the tablets by Research in Motion, which means that the device had already been finalized in terms of hardware. With one million units to be shipped to RIM this quarter, it is likely that the company wants to sell them all in March as later during the year the company is projected to release 3G and 4G versions of Playbook.

It is interesting to note that Motorola plans to sell 700 - 800 thousand Xoom slates in Q1 2011.

BlackBerry PlayBook is based on a dual-core ARM microprocessor and features 1GB of memory, an unknown amount of flash storage, dual HD cameras (5MP rear facing and 3MB front facing), Wi-Fi - 802.11 a/b/g/n (3G and 4G models to be available in the future), Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR, microHDMI as well as microUSB connectors and so on. The product fully supports MP3, full-HD video playback (1080p, H.264, MPEG, DivX, WMV) as well as WebKit/HTML-5, Adobe Flash Player 10.1, Adobe Mobile AIR, Adobe Reader, POSIX, OpenGL, Java. The slate features 7" screen with 1024x600 resolution and weighs less than a pound (400g). The device will cost less than $500, according to the company.

Tags: RIM, Blackberry, PlayBook, Quanta, Motorola, Xoom