BlackBerry PlayBook Simulator Updated – Includes Web Browser with Flash 10.1

RIM just rolled out a new version of the BlackBerry PlayBook Tablet OS simulator with one major update. The new version finally includes the full BlackBerry browser so we can now start testing our web and Flash applications using the real browser. Here are some notes that RIM passed along:

• The User Agent will continue to match the current User Agent pattern used with BlackBerry smartphone products. This will enable developers to continue to leverage the development investment they have placed into building web pages optimized for BlackBerry already.
• The browser builds on the existing support for web standards such as HTML5 for the BlackBerry by adding support for HTML5 Video and Audio based on the power and flexibility of the underlying BlackBerry Tablet OS. 
• The browser supports Adobe Flash 10.1, and Flash developers will be able to test the Flash player in the simulator.

The new user agent looks similar to the previous BlackBerry user agents like so:

BlackBerry Torch 9800 Smartphone User Agent
Mozilla/5.0 (BlackBerry; U; BlackBerry 9800; en) AppleWebKit/534.1+
(KHTML, Like Gecko) Version/6.0.0.141 Mobile Safari/534.1+

BlackBerry PlayBook Tablet User Agent
Mozilla/5.0 (PlayBook; U; BlackBerry Tablet OS x.y.z; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.8+
(KHTML, Like Gecko) Version/a.b.c Mobile Safari/534.8+

You can learn more about the simulator from the blog post RIM put up on their official DevBlog. Alternatively you can simply download the new BlackBerry PlayBook simulator at this link.