BlackBerry PlayBook Arrives to Fight iPad, Xoom

Well of course not! The Blackberry is not magical like the iPad! /Sarcasm

The PlayBook looks like it will have some success, but the Xoom still remains the best tablet to date.

First of all...STOP WITH THE SPAM...second of all, I think the Playbook has a few advantages over the Xoom namely the price and UI.

hay apple, here is your next target! aim your nuclear powered corporate sue monster at RIM, they just *have* to be copying you somehow right?

My friends that have an iPad2 got invited to try out the Playbook first hand today. They were rather impressed, it seems.

Oh, and Tom's...seriously do something about spam. You're making this site look like a joke.

I purchased a PlayBook today and love it. It pairs very well (and quickly) with my BlackBerry phone and I have access to email, etc., plus internet browsing without WiFi if I'm in an area without WiFi, with no additional data plan. Several of my friends played with it and liked the size. They don't have BlackBerrys but weren't concerned about using a browser to access Gmail; it was a non-issue for them. I definitely prefer not having a native email client because I don't want to be syncing mail three ways (PC, phone, tablet). The user interface is just beautiful and fast. I know that people who are fanatics about iPhones and iPads will want to tear this comment apart. You can do that, but some day you will learn that more than one company can create a beautiful and state-of-the-art product.

Already bought the Motorola Xoom WiFi. Works fantastic. Honestly no need for a laptop. Photos, Email, Video, Internet, Games, whatever I want.

I think I heard Blackberry touting the upcoming Playbook all the way back to a year ago. To be quite honest, I never cared enough to even look into what it was until recently. But that was after I already purchased my Xoom. It's all good though, because my next phone will be a Droid too.

Will have a Blackberry Tour to sell in a month if anyone wants.

Glad you're enjoying it, i think you're using it exactly the way RIM wants you to, with your BB phone attached etc. But i feel the reduced functionality in the absence of a BB phone makes it less appealing to the demographic outside of owning a BB phone.

what is the hardware spec?

Tom's looks more and more like a trading place for counterfeit goods.

How difficult is it to implement a filter that eliminates multiple uses of the $ or a website?
And also, automatically banning the OP so they can't go ahead and spam other sections of the website?

They took a real "positive" approach by breaking the voting system, so not even the other commentators can "ban" the spammers with their negative votes. That was "smart" .....

Spammers are not just those with multiple $, there have been a bunch of very elaborate spammers around, taking real comments from related topics on other threads, posting them here, with just one or 2 links, just as a real poster would do.
The thumbs up/down system can be easily manipulated by the multitude of bots that spam around. There needs to be a just "thumbs up" for the good comments that is up to the opinion of the voter, and a "report as spam" option for moderators to delete the comment later. With a reputation system, either hidden or shown, on the validity of spam reports, else the bots could mess up the "report as spam" also. So, with a reputation system for reporting true spam and no false positives, a user, or even a bot, would need to report Correctly for let's say 20 times before the vote starts to count. And a message gathering 10 votes for spam could be hidden automatically till the moderator comes to work and deletes it, or restores it back if a false positive (and lowers the reputation of the one reporting it, guessing it's probably a malevolent bot trying to disrupt the system).

If you like this idea, vote for it at the feedbacks session of tomshardware. Or click here and vote: http://feedbacks.tomshardware.com/ [...] hting-spam
Let's fight back for this site we like.

Wait, someone bought a Xoom? lulz

I think that banning the words "handbag" and a few brand names woudl take care of most of the spam.

do hope that the spammer above has printed "Armaini" on his sunglasses, as per his spam- that would be good.

Maybe Tom's should just delay new account postings for 2 weeks. From which an email & confirmation(s) must be met prior to posting.

Add a "spam thumb" for anything that gets through beyond that so readers can moderate on the fly.

Am very happy with my Playbook after half a day (and half the night) trying it out, complete with Bridge to my Blackberry. Agree with Padammsm above. Don't need an extra data plan (Rogers would charge extra $15/month to share a data plan between a smartphone and iPad), and though I'm sure the native email app is coming, for now it's fine with me not to worry about another layer of synching. The Bridge works 100 feet away.
My 15 year old son was very impressed with the web browsing and the overall interface. As someone who had an iPod touch and has a Droid phone, he knows the kinds of apps that are out there, and thought that most of them weren't necessary. We both thought that the apps on launch date were ok, definitely more will be coming soon, but it's very usable right from the word go.

Please copy these spammers' URLs, go to their web site's 'Contact Us' link, and use anonymous email (e.g. www.sendanonymousemail.net) to spam them back. I just make up a random 'from' and reasonable subject (order status?, order from Tuesday?). I usually just make the email body be a message like 'stop posting to Tom's Hardware' and then a copy of their ad. If their customer support emails become flooded to the point of uselessness, they will cut it out. I take a little time out each day to hit one of them 10 or 20 times.

Make it "BlackBerry PlayBook Arrives to Fight iPad". Xoom is not exactly a success!

Based on what exactly?

Too much hassle. We can DDoS it anytime. It's probably a scam anyway.