BlackBerry Playbook 4G to be announced on August 9

We’ve recently featured a 10.1” tablet that is believed to be the next Blackberry Playbook and apparently there is some truth to this. Today RIM announced that they will be releasing the Blackberry Playbook 4G on the 9th of this month.

Although not the 10-inch tablet that we’ve mentioned on our previous post, RIM will be releasing the 4G version of the 7-inch Blackberry Playbook which is also shown in the leaked photos here.

The LTE slate will initially be released in Canada and there’s still no word about its pricing or if the tablet will ship to other parts of the world. But apart from having SIM card slot for a 4G LTE connectivity and a major bump on its processor which is now a dual-core 1.5GHz, the new Playbook remains pretty much the same as the previous model.

We’re not sure what RIM’s up to, but we’re guessing that these are the unsold units from last year. The logic is quite simple actually, take a solidly built 7” tablet, rig it with a more powerful processor and throw an LTE capability for good measure and Voila! The company got itself a more marketable slate. But how this will fare in the Canadian market is still remains to be seen.