Earlier today we announced the 4G LTE™ BlackBerry® PlayBook™ tablet, which will be available in Canada on August 9th and will become available in other countries and regions around the world in the coming months. With its ultra-fast 4G LTE wireless network support and 1.5 GHz dual core processor, this device delivers an improved performance experience. For those of you who work from home, travel frequently or who are constantly on the road and need wireless connectivity beyond Wi-Fi®, your PlayBook tablet has now arrived.

Experiencing the 4G LTE BlackBerry PlayBook Tablet

When you’re running from one meeting to the next or trying to catch a plane, you need all of your information to be consolidated in one place as it arrives in your inbox. You need to have this information be easy to digest, organize, and filter. This is where the unified inbox of BlackBerry® PlayBook™ OS 2.0 provides serious benefit, with all of your emails, LinkedIn® messages, Facebook® notifications, and Twitter® mentions flowing simply and cleanly into the inbox.

Your flight information, hotel confirmation, and map to the conference center can be stored in the Print To Go® application, where you “printed” them from your PC to the PlayBook tablet as they were received. Information about who you’re meeting with, which may include people you may have never met before, is automatically culled for you from LinkedIn and stored in the Calendar application, giving you context and helping you be better prepared for your meetings.

Sure, hotels and airports generally have Wi-Fi®, but cabs, trains, city streets, and many restaurants are still gaps that need to be filled. For those with Wi-Fi enabled PlayBook tablets, the BlackBerry® Bridge™ app or the Mobile Hotspot feature with BlackBerry® 7.1 OS smartphones can help keep you connected. But with a 4G LTE BlackBerry PlayBook tablet you’ll have broader coverage and faster wireless access on 4G LTE while on the go (when a 4G LTE network is available).

When you’re back in the hotel at the end of your day, take some time for yourself. You’ll find amazing games for the PlayBook tablet on the BlackBerry App World™ storefront. You also shouldn’t have to worry about the mix of corporate and personal data, and neither should your organization; BlackBerry® Balance™ technology helps keep those data stores nicely separated within your PlayBook tablet.

Solving the Challenges of Mobile Device Management for Your Organization

You may have a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policy within your organization, perhaps mixed with a few corporately-provisioned smartphones, and even a few special cases within your executive staff. There is little black and white and many shades of gray when it comes to the mobile landscape within many organizations today, both large and small. BlackBerry® Mobile Fusion is our solution to making sense of it all, designed to protect your data, help meet priorities of both employees and IT departments, and ultimately help to lower your total cost of ownership.

BlackBerry Mobile Fusion is designed to allow your organization to manage BlackBerry®, iOS®, and Android™ smartphones and tablets from a single unified interface, leveraging existing BlackBerry technology and new innovations to provide an all-in-one solution from a trusted and experienced provider that’s been delivering Mobile Device Management solutions to enterprise and government customers for more than a decade.

Combined with the BlackBerry® Device Service component of BlackBerry Mobile Fusion, your 4G LTE PlayBook tablet can be securely connected and fully integrated with common corporate mail servers like Microsoft® Exchange®, Lotus® Domino, or Novell® GroupWise®, helping to keep emails, contacts, and calendar appointments synchronized every step of the way so that you won’t miss a beat.

The Experience Doesn’t Stop Here

In future blog posts, we’ll be diving deeper into a fully optimized mobile office experience. Add in a BlackBerry® Mini Keyboard and the Citrix® Receiver for BlackBerry PlayBook tablets, for example, and you’ve got a serious powerhouse of productivity and functionality that can be far easier on the bottom-line (and easier to carry), than laptops or other on-the-go technology. The 4G LTE BlackBerry PlayBook will be pre-loaded with OS 2.0.1, which is also now available for Wi-Fi PlayBook owners as a maintenance update.

The 4G LTE BlackBerry PlayBook tablet is currently available in Canada from Bell, Rogers and TELUS. Get all of the details in our press release, and learn more on the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet web site. Data plans are sold separately.

Do you travel often for business? How would you use a 4G LTE BlackBerry PlayBook tablet? Share in the comments below.

* LTE connectivity is currently only available from a limited number of carriers in specific countries. Where LTE is not available, the 4G LTE BlackBerry PlayBook tablet can automatically adjust to connect on HSPA+.

For those that are unfamiliar with Docs To Go, it is a powerful mobile office suite that allows you to view and edit Microsoft Word, Excel®, and PowerPoint® files and attachments on BlackBerry® smartphones and BlackBerry PlayBook tablets. You also have the ability to present PowerPoint documents from your BlackBerry PlayBook by plugging into a projector or TV via an HDMI connection. While in presenter mode, speaking notes are visible on your PlayBook, while your presentation itself is visible from the projector or TV. Updates to BlackBerry® Bridge™ in PlayBook OS 2.0 further enhance this feature by allowing you to control “back” and “next” functionality using your BlackBerry smartphone.

Feature Improvements to the Docs To Go Suite

• Editing text within Microsoft PowerPoint documents is now supported
• The suite now supports BlackBerry® Balance™ for keeping corporate documents and data secure
• Find & Replace functionality has been added to the Microsoft Word and Excel feature list
• Bluetooth® keyboards and keyboard-shortcuts are now supported
• You can now clear files from the “Recently Used Files” list
• Password-protected Office 2010 files can now be accessed
• When presenting, you can now use your BlackBerry smartphone with BlackBerry Bridge as a remote control to move forward and backward through your presentation

Specific enhancements have been implemented for individual applications within the suite.

• While editing Microsoft Word documents, you’ll have the ability to create and edit both bulleted and numbered lists.
• Editing Microsoft Excel files includes functionality which allows you to copy, paste, and resize cells, rows, and columns. Additionally, you may view and update embedded charts and chart sheets. Lastly, a new formula wizard has been added for easy entry of over 110 supported functions.
• Working with Microsoft PowerPoint files will include editing of text in in both .ppt and .pptx file formats, and also allows you to hide/show slides with basic HDMI presenter-mode optimizations. Lastly, viewing of charts within PowerPoint .pptx files has also been improved.

Introducing Print To Go version 1.0

Print To Go eliminates the hassle of mountains of paper files by wireless printing from your laptop or PC directly to your BlackBerry PlayBook tablet with the simple click of a “print” button. With an easy-to-install Microsoft® Windows® application, Print To Go is added as a printer to your system. You can view, sort, and manage digital printouts from various sources like web pages, documents, emails, or other applications – all within a very slick and intuitive user interface that mimics physical sheets of paper, which was inspired by our friends over at The Astonishing Tribe (TAT).

For example, before jumping on a plane to attend CES 2012 in Las Vegas, I printed all of the planning documents and schedules that I had kept on my PC, right to my BlackBerry PlayBook tablet, which allowed me to reference these files while en route. I did the same with a map of the city, as well as my flight and hotel booking information. In the office, I have the ability to quickly transfer a document to my BlackBerry PlayBook tablet for use in a meeting or a coffee shop conversation with a colleague. Taking your work on the go is quick and functional with PlayBook OS 2.0 and the Print To Go application. For solutions that allow you to print documents from your PlayBook tablet to a physical printer, look no further than BlackBerry App World™.

On to the specifics!

Print To Go version 1.0 includes the following:

• A Microsoft® Windows® application that installs a virtual “Print To Go” printer onto your computer that can be accessed from any application that allows printing (e.g. Microsoft Office, web pages, image viewers, and more)
• Secure wireless peer-to-peer printing from your PC to the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet over Wi-Fi®, including end-to-end encryption of the documents
• If you have BlackBerry Balance in use on your BlackBerry PlayBook tablet, all printouts are automatically sent to the secure “Work” partition
• Secure printing using your BlackBerry ID
• Notifications on the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet when new printouts arrive
• A Print To Go app on the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet that allows you to view, sort, and manage printouts as if they were physical stacks of paper on a desktop
• A virtual paper shredder for deleting the digital printouts from your BlackBerry PlayBook tablet

These enhancements to the Docs To Go office suite, as well as the addition of Print To Go, will truly push the abilities of mobile work far forward. Working from your tablet, especially when using a Bluetooth keyboard or an HDMI monitor connection, now provides a higher level of functionality and capability when creating, editing, presenting or sharing documents. We hope that Print To Go will not only save paper, but also help you to unclutter your work life by keeping your desk clean and allowing you to use your BlackBerry PlayBook tablet as a resource for handling printed documents.

How will you use Print To Go in your daily work? Share in the comments below.