BlackBerry PlayBook: Great Tablet, But Not Much to Play With

Once an industry darling, Research in Motion (RIM), the company that makes BlackBerry devices, has lately been navigating stormy seas. RIM’s market share has fallen in key markets like the US thanks to smartphones powered by a visibly aging OS and almost obsolete hardware specs when compared with other top-of-the-line competitors. The BlackBerry PlayBook is supposed to be RIM’s saviour, not only launching RIM into the red-hot tablet market, but also powered by the all-new QNX OS, as well as boasting of some great hardware specs. And not too far in the future QNX is also supposed to come to a whole new spiffy generation of BlackBerry smartphones.

It's finally here

The BlackBerry PlayBook launched in the US in April 2011 and today will be available in India. We’ve had a review unit of the PlayBook for a little over a week and here are our impressions on RIM’s big hope.

Form Factor
Businesslike. Tough, yet cool. In true BlackBerry tradition this baby featuring a 7-inch high-resolution 1024 x 600 WSVGA capacitive touchscreen with 4-finger multi-touch and gesture support looks business-chic. The display is brilliant even in bright sunlight. Seems a bit heavy for its size though at 425 gms, but once I started using it, I loved its feel in my hands. With a back that’s sort of rubberized (in a very nice way!), this thing is built tough and am confident could easily take a few nasty falls without a murmur.

Connectivity options along the edge of the Playbook

Our review unit came with 16GB of internal memory and 1GB RAM, but 32 and 64GB versions are available. There’s no support for microSD cards or SIM cards. The only buttons are located on the top of the device and considering the width of the PlayBook is just 10mm, the buttons are tiny, but adequate. One button switches the device on and off and the other three are volume control/scroll/media buttons. At the bottom the PlayBook has a microUSB slot for charging and tethering to a PC as well as an HDMI port that allows you to directly play movies or presentations on compatible displays, and a port for docking the PlayBook. On either side of the screen are high-quality stereo speakers. There’s a stereo microphone on the top left corner and a 3.5mm audio jack on the top right corner. The PlayBook comes with 2 cameras—a 3 MP 1080p HD ready forward-facing camera and a 5 MP 1080p HD ready rear-facing camera.

Unboxing the Blackberry Playbook

While the PlayBook is definitely more portable compared to 10-inch tablets like the iPad2, Moto Xoom, Samsung Galaxy Tab 10 or the upcoming HP TouchPad, it won’t exactly fit into your pocket. Granted, it slides into the back pockets of my jeans like the 7-inch Galaxy Tab (and the PlayBook’s so much slimmer), but it’s not a great feeling carrying it around and besides if you ever try it while travelling in public transport you can say goodbye to your tablet faster than you can say PlayBook. But when you’re travelling cattle class on a packed flight, it’s definitely more usable as compared to its 10-inch brethren.

Features and Performance
QNX, or what is now officially called the BlackBerry Tablet OS boasts of symmetric multiprocessing capabilities and is an admirable piece of software—definitely an industrial strength piece of work that didn’t crash on me even once. Now, though some among the RIM faithful like to point out that QNX is also used in nuclear power plants, high-end routers, etc. do keep in mind that what’s running on your tablet may not have much in common with the QNX software powering a nuclear power plant except for a few lines of code. It's a bit like Fiat Palio fanatics who used to claim that because Fiat also owns Ferrari, the Palio had some characteristics of a Ferrari. Yeah right! RIM is also constantly tinkering with the OS — in the week or so we had the device, we received two OTA OS updates.

Neatly laid out home screen

When you add a 1GHz dual-core Cortex-A9 CPU to the mix, the result is blazing performance. So, you have jaw-dropping multitasking capabilities where you can have an HD video, the web browser or games and more open and scroll between all these windows and have the feature you click on start playing instantly. Eg, you can have a video from the PlayBook playing on your TV through an HDMI cable while you surf the Net. Whether this is really practical (you’d need a long cable indeed!) and whether anyone really wants to do this in the real world is a question RIM fails to answer.

Touch controls are on the margins of the bezel and with a finger swipe you can switch between apps/windows as well as activate menus. A swipe from bezel to bezel gets the device started when it’s in sleep mode. Vertical finger swipes (bottom to top) can minimize and close open apps/windows. A downward finger swipe from the top right corner brings up the system menu. Open apps appear as a series of smaller windows on the top half of the screen, and you can scroll though them. I liked that part. If you’ve used the Palm Pre which ran webOS, some aspects of the PlayBook’s UI might induce déjà vu.

Very limited applications on the new platform

The bottom of the screen holds icons such as ‘All,’ ‘Media,’ ‘Games’ and ‘Favorites,’ besides ‘Bridge’ when using BlackBerry Bridge. A few minutes is all it took to get used to the swipes needed for navigation on the device. Although not as intuitive as the iPad, this one’s pretty darn close. The keyboard’s nice enough but one minor issue is that the gyroscope seems to often have a mind of its own. Speed of reorientation can be annoying and often you need to give it a thorough shake to get the screen into the correct position. I couldn’t do without the orientation lock.

The browser is perhaps the best RIM has built to date and is full-featured with full Adobe Flash 10.3 enabled. With built-in support for HTML 5, this is almost as good as a standard desktop browser and this is a strong advantage the PlayBook possesses. I had absolutely no problems with Flash-enabled sites and the browser rendered text, graphics and video very well. I didn't miss browsing on a PC when I used the PlayBook to browse the web.