Before we left CES 2011 we again sat down again with Ryan Bidan, the Senior Product Manager on the BlackBerry PlayBook team to work through a bunch of the questions we've been seeing here on CrackBerry related to the BlackBerry PlayBook. At the CES BlackBerry booth many of the same questions have been getting asked, so the Inside BlackBerry Blog did a quick interview with Ryan addressing the big questions they too have been hearing.

We'll follow up with our written BlackBerry PlayBook FAQ soon, and in the meantime you can check out the video above. There's been a bit of a misconception going around online that in order to use the BlackBerry PlayBook that you'll need to own a BlackBerry Smartphone, which is not the case. A native email and calendar client may not be there at launch, but it is definitely on the roadmap (likely sooner than later) for the PlayBook and new OS. In the meantime there will be the BlackBerry Bridge for BlackBerry owners that turns the PlayBook into a big screen for your phone's email, calendar, contacts, tasks, and BBM (no data stored on PlayBook) and access is there via the web browser as well. It's clear that the QNX-based BlackBerry Tablet OS is still in early days and it's going to be evolving rapidly. Unlike the phones where carriers dictate OS update releases, with the PlayBook RIM will be able to push them out to consumers quickly, and I'm sure we'll be in for a lot of updates in the early days. It's a solid base to begin with, and it's only going to get better, that's for sure.

Source: Inside BB