RIM (RIMM) Now Taking Orders on PlayBook

Retailer Best Buy (BBY) announced it'll now be taking orders on Research in Motion's (Nasdaq:RIMM) tablet offering "Playbook," moving the share price up in early trading, although it has pulled back some as the day has gone on.

These are pre-orders being offered, as the BlackBerry PlayBook won't be available in stores until April 19 in the North American market.

Playbooks will be available in "Best Buy stores and Best Buy Mobile stores in the US, as well as Best Buy and Future Shop stores in Canada, on April 19, 2011," said the company.

You can go to the website of Best Buy and click on a link to pre-order the device.

Prices for Playbook are lower than originally put forth, starting off at $499.99 for a 16 gigabyte Wi-Fi model, and runs through $699.99 for the 64GB version. This is similar to the price being asked for for Apple's iPad 2 (NASDAQ:AAPL).

As the sale of Playbook rolls out, RIM said they have close to 20,000 retailers to distribute the tablet in North America.

Research in Motion was trading at $62.29, up $0.12, or 0.19 percent, as of 11:55 AM EDT.