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Late last month RIM acquired the blackpad.com domain, causing a snowballing of BlackBerry Tablet rumours. This week, news is that RIM has supposedly employed Taiwanese notebook manufacturer Quanta to make the devices. The rumours come with speculation of the tablet shipping two million units in 2010 and a further eight million in 2011.

The latest rumour cites the device as having a 9.7" screen, at odds with the previous news that RIM had purchased a large quantity of 8.9" screens from manufacturer Hon Hai. Features that seem more certain are a front and rear facing camera, Wi-Fi and 3G, BlackBerry 6.0 and a price of around $500. There's also speculation that it will be powered by a 1GHz Marvell Processor.

While the only "iPad killer features" it may seem to provide at the moment are the front and rear facing cameras, this is not much of an edge considering the rate at which news of new tablets is popping up. The market looks set to become increasingly crowded at some point in the near future with little to differentiate between. Apple is rumoured to be releasing the iPad 2 early in 2011, which will remedy the missing features that users have so badly wanted such, as the cameras and VoIP.

Quanta, which has become one of the largest notebook manufactuers in the world supplying Acer, Dell and HP to name a few, seems a likely candidate for manufacturing the BlackPad.

Whoever makes it, and whatever the spec, it seems the 10 million unit estimate could be a little on the optimistic side unless RIM has something really special planned.

If the November release is true then anyone who has put a tablet on their Christmas list might want to be a little more specific as it seems like it won't be just the iPad filling stockings this year.

© Rethink Wireless

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