The Android App Player is the latest in a long line of software additions to the BlackBerry tablet, allowing users to run any number of Android apps on the PlayBook, giving the tablet a huge content boost.
The feature was announced by RIM a month or so ago, but sadly won’t be available until the summer at some point.
Still, this is big news for PlayBook users and app developers alike, because as RIM’s senior manager for platform architecture points out, “You’ll be able to take your application, package it, sign it and deploy it to App world and you’ll be able to download it directly into PlayBook and run it.”
“The point is really about expanding the set of apps that are available for the Playbook so we just want to get them from every possible source and Android applications are definitely a rich source,” he added.
The Android apps run in a special window rather obviously called “application player.” From the user’s point of view, there’s apparently no distinction between Android apps in the Player and native Blackberry apps, and performance is described as “incredible and pretty much instantaneous.”
Take a look for yourselves:
