BlackBerry PlayBook review

The words “play” and “book” are just a little a strange choice for RIM’s latest attempt at consumer relevance, a tablet that, at its core, runs one of the crucial hardcore and industry-friendly operating systems known to man. The OS is QNX and the hardware is, in fact, the BlackBerry PlayBook. It’s an enterprise-friendly offering that’s also out to beat the patron tablet ecosphere, hoping to follow within the footsteps of the BlackBerry handsets which have filled the pockets of corporate executives and BBM addicts worldwide.

It’s something of a major tablet when put next to the contest running software from Apple and Google and, while it certainly has games, its biggest strengths are way more boring. It does a very great job at displaying PowerPoint presentations, as an example, and has the safety chops to maintain last quarter’s dismal sales figures from falling into the incorrect hands. Exciting stuff? No, but useful features indubitably, and whether you locate those intriguing or boring this can be RIM’s seven-inch, Flash-having but 3G-lacking tablet clad in an unassuming but extremely sophisticated exterior. It’s what’s running behind the glass that disappoints.

Hardware

The black PlayBook, with its angular edges and dark styling, looks decidedly nondescript, likely to open up a wormhole somewhere in orbit around Jupiter than leap into someone’s hands at retail. Only the chrome logo ’round the back adds some flare, with the word “BlackBerry” subtly embossed below the display at the front. The chassis is cool metal, ever so slightly rubberized, the rims squared off, and there’s absolutely no flex or give anywhere. It feels perfectly solid and doesn’t yield to any attempted contortions, despite being just 0.4-inches thick — under a 10th thicker than an iPad 2. At 0.9 pounds, it’s considerably lighter, but slightly heavier than the .83 pound Galaxy Tab .

Debate concerning the perfect tablet size rages on, but we need to say the marginally smallish factor here creates a tool that’s comfortable to roam with. The sunshine weight certainly makes it easier for reading and the more hand-friendly size makes it feel more well-off to hold. That size, plus the dark coloring, makes this slate a little bit less obvious than much of the contest, that’s certainly a part of its understated charm.

Up top are four buttons, the best physical controls to be found: volume up, volume down, play/pause, and an unfortunately small power button that’s flush with the chassis. It’s impossible to seek out by feel and, once located, difficult to activate. You’ll be able to’t really hit it without using a fingernail or even then it requires numerous pressure to modulate. Plus, it’s located centrally on top of the device, exactly where your fingers likely aren’t.

It sounds crazy, but that is, hands-down, the worst section of the hardware. Consider how often you operate the facility button in your phone to toggle the screen after which imagine having to stab really hard at it with a fingernail instead. It’s hugely frustrating and, when you can turn the screen on by swiping your complete way from bezel-to-bezel. Even in this seven-incher that’s a piece ornery — and there’s no way instead of the ability button to disable the screen.

A five megapixel camera peeks out the back, while a 3 megapixel unit handles front-facing duties. That one is tucked under the glass and situated just above the seven-inch, 1,024 x 600 display a good way to threaten neither rods nor cones when on maximum brightness. It does, however, deliver great clarity and perfect viewing angles.

Hidden away at the bottom are three ports: micro-HDMI, micro-USB, and a proprietary three-prong charging connector to be used when the item settles down in its docking cradle or gets cozy with the optional external adapter — charging at twice the velocity of micro-USB. Up top there’s another hole, a humble 3.5mm headphone jack, but when you look closely you’ll also spot stereo speaker grilles cut into each side of the glass.

Internals

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Running the show is a dual-core, 1GHz TI OMAP processor that’s expertly massaged and manipulated by the QNX OS here. QNX is a decidedly efficient and bulletproof operating system that powers everything from jet fighters to, well, little black tablets. That’s backed by 1GB of RAM and 16, 32, or 64GB of storage, with the smallest costing $499 and every subsequent step adding $100 to the price of entry.

Graphics are handled by a PowerVR chip, which quite handily offloads video decoding and gaming acceleration from the processor, enabling this thing to decode and display 1080p video over HDMI while still ticking along quite smoothly and running productivity apps at the seven-inch display. Not a touch of dithering or pixilation, for sure. Apps load quickly, are usually impressively responsive, and switching from one to the subsequent is effortless.

Early builds of the PlayBook software (we’re now on our third since taking possession of the object) seemingly had some issues managing memory, and on multiple occasions we found upper corners glowing red. Our first thought was that the guns on our CRT were misaligned by a wayward magnet, but that is just how the PlayBook alerts you to issues, as a consequence a scarcity of memory. Memory management seems much improved within the newest build we’ve received, but you could certainly still kill unwanted apps when you want by simply swiping them vertically, off into oblivion.

Connectivity

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There are many flavors of 4G coming down the pipe for the PlayBook later this year, including a WiMAX sampler for Sprint in addition to HSPA+ and LTE for… well, for other carriers. That leaves us with 802.11a/b/g/n connectivity, plus Bluetooth in fact. Using that last standard you may pair up a keyboard and mouse; accomplish that and a microscopic cursor appears at the screen. Left clicks for taps and right-clicks for gestures, initiated on the fringe of the screen instead of off of it. This, as you’d expect, turns intuitive gestures into clumsy mouse flicks.

Curiously, though, the device doesn’t support simple USB mass storage — you’ll be able to’t just plug it in on your laptop and dump a gaggle of files on it. You’re able to mount it as a drive over USB, but you then have only access to a small, read-only volume that features a single driver. Install that and the PlayBook shows up as a network drive.

Deliciously, this driver lets you access the device over the network or connected directly over USB, but when you’re rocking something apart from a Mac or a computer you’re going to be disappointed the primary time you are trying to tether here. And, without a simple mass storage mode, it’s way more complicated that it is going to be in case you just are looking to get a file off the item.

Battery life

With day-to-day usage, WiFi on, screen reasonably bright, trying out some websites and playing some tunes, the PlayBook has numerous juice to get you thru a pair days without breaking a sweat. It’ll handily survive your all-day presentation on the office, make you look cool in front of your boss, then still have quite a lot of battery life left to relax out to a few N.W.A. at the flight home.

But, when compared with the contest, it delivers a superior mid-pack performance. We looped a normal MPEG4 video clip with WiFi enabled and screen brightness at about 65 percent, managing seven hours and one minute in the beginning went dark. That’s about an hour greater than the Samsung Galaxy Tab, but over an hour lower than the Motorola Xoom. The iPad 2, meanwhile, manages ten and a half hours when similarly stressed.

Software

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Operating system

Like webOS? If that’s the case, you’re going to like what’s hiding under the PlayBook’s (healthy) bezels. System gestures originate to the side of the pixels and terminate at the screen — apart from the swipe to show the screen on, which has you dragging from one bezel all of the way across to the other one.

To change from one app to the following you will swipe inward from the left or the suitable, which pops the app out of full-screen and allows you to move forward or back within the queue. a faucet then maximizes your new favorite app. Or, a swipe up from the ground promises a fair higher-level view of your running apps, you could again zing your way through. Grabbing one and throwing it upward sends it to the rubbish collector, otherwise you can tap the tiny X that looks next to its name.

Swiping from the pinnacle of the app brings down a context menu, extra controls that allow you to save files in Word to head or jump from one album to a different inside the media player. Finally, swipe in from either top corner of the screen and also you get a system context menu that displays the date and time, simple media controls, battery and connectivity indicators, and a little bit gear you are able to tap to tweak your system settings.

Ultimately it’s very intuitive to make use of and, even better, it feels remarkable. The dynamic action of throwing a frustrating application right off of the screen is extremely satisfying, and the shortage of any multi-finger antics certainly makes task-switching a miles surer affair. Everything is quick and responsive — just what you are expecting on a tablet that costs this much money.

Keyboard

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At the beginning blush, the keyboard at the PlayBook seems quite good. In landscape mode the keys are spread wide but still reachable by thumbs in case you hold this tablet by its horizontal extents — well, in case you don’t have particularly short thumbs, anyway. Flipped into portrait it’s an excellent easier reach, but obviously a piece more precision is needed.

However, spend a couple of minutes pecking away and things begin to look much more dire. Neither numbers nor special keys come in without digging into the logo menu — even the exclamation point and the question were driven to obscurity. This suggests if you would like anything more exotic than a humble period or comma you’re going to go find it. In reality, typing “you’re” right there required hitting the logo key to locate the apostrophe — there’s no system-wide auto-correction here (it only works in some apps), no long-presses for alternate characters. What year is that this, again?

There’s, at the very least, copy and paste, and it’s well-implemented, using a couple of blue tabs to spotlight the text you will want. Drag them to define the boundaries of your text after which your selection is filed away into your clipboard of holding. Annoyingly, though, a double-tap on any word doesn’t highlight it.

Browser

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RIM has provided a whole 1 Webkit 1 browser if you want to get your surf on, and it’s a fairly good one. Pages load quickly and of course are rendered in full desktop mode, with the entire pinch-to-zoom goodness and snappy motion you’d expect. Flash Player 10.1 is on-board and works well. YouTube videos play perfectly fine and stutter-free when embedded within pages, though there’s a dedicated YouTube app you need to use in the event you like. Even Flash games like Bejeweled play well, important in case you’re still riding that exact horse.

We ran the browser through SunSpider JavaScript test, where it returned a quite healthy 2,360. That’s maybe 10 percent slower than the iPad 2 and Motorola Xoom manage, but still quite respectable.

We must always note that we noticed some weirdness within the browser with the newest (third) revision of the PlayBook software we received. When the system was running under load, with numerous other apps hanging around inside the background, the browser would frequently and disconcertingly close. It could simply disappear about half-way through loading whatever page we tried. Closing a number of apps perceived to fix it, but behavior like that’s always a touch unnerving.

Calculator

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Yes, we’re really writing in regards to the calculator app here. It’s among the many many apps at the tablet developed by 2 The Astonishing Tribe 2 , a dev team acquired by RIM who previously worked to define much of the appear and feel of Android. The calculator app especially sticks out with the team’s patented style. Whether you’re in standard or scientific mode, a “paper” tally prints each calculation, digital pulp that may be virtually torn off and disposed. Cute. Slightly more effective is the integrated unit converter, this means that we’ll never must look far to get horsepower from kW, and the top calculator can make your next night in town go just a little more smoothly — assuming you didn’t spend the whole meal fidgeting with your tablet.

Pictures

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It’s another of the TAT-developed apps, and though simple it shows some nice touches with overlaid transitions as you swipe from image to image. It’s after all quite minimalistic, but a pleasure to exploit.

Adobe Reader

PDF and enterprises go together like executives and golden parachutes, so it’s no surprise that Adobe is on-board here with a custom version of Reader. It’s a PDF viewer at heart and, therefore, boring. But, performance is excellent, whether thumbing through boring statistics or pinch-zooming in on tables and charts, regardless of files laden with megabyte after megabyte of stock images of lovely people smiling.

Music

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Open the music app and you’ve four big, handy buttons to select from: artists, albums, genres, or all songs — the latter for users who can’t be constrained by such arbitrary classifications. Albums are simply displayed in an enormous grid, tap one to play it, while artists and individual songs go right into a long list. The lists are slightly unwieldy, especially because you can’t jump to a undeniable letter, but there’s real-time filtering via a search dialog.

Documents to move suite

The PlayBook comes loaded with Word, Sheet, and Slideshow to head from DataVis, supplying you with the power to view PPT, DOC, and XLS files, even create the latter two right at the tablet. Viewing and editing documents is unquestionably easy enough and naturally having the ability to achieve this makes for heightened productivity, but looking to enter Excel formulas using the on-screen keyboard will raise only your blood pressure.

BlackBerry Bridge

Bridge was some of the last pieces of the puzzle to come back together within the PlayBook, added mere hours ago, and it’s one of the crucial strongest yet weakest aspects of the device. Here you pair your PlayBook up with a phone running BlackBerry OS five or six, which must itself be running the Bridge app. Both talk sweet nothings over Bluetooth and, once connected, a brand new suite of applications is enabled at the tablet.

During this way you get your standard productivity stuff: e-mail, calendar, contacts, tasks, and memos. There’s also an choice to run the Bridge Browser, viewing the internet throughout the phone interface, but as of this moment that feature is solely busted — the app crashed anytime we tried it. The opposite apps, though, are good. Simple. They’re exactly what BlackBerry smartphone users are going to need, but they’re also exactly what non-BlackBerry smartphone users will want and, in the event you don’t have a phone to pair, they disappear.

Yes, you will get in your web mail provider of choice here, however the loss of dedicated, basic productivity applications like these appears like an immense oversight. This can be RIM expecting 100 pc crossover between PlayBook buyers and current BlackBerry owners, and that seems unnecessarily limiting. Yes, these apps 3 are coming 3 , but they need to be here now.

What’s missing

Non-Bridge productivity apps (e-mail, calendar, etc.) are the most important omission, but other things are missing too, like that awesome 4 scrapbooking app 4 from TAT that got us feeling all crafty. It’s nowhere to be found. Also missing? The mysterious Android compatibility, support that’s coming but sadly won’t be working at launch. The flexibility to run Android apps could totally change the sport — or it is usually a non-event. We won’t know until RIM flips the switch and lets us all test it out.

Overall, the choice in App World and at the device itself is very limited these days. RIM is quick to show that there are literally thousands of apps within the pipeline, written in some combination of Adobe AIR or HTML 5 or Java or in the PlayBook’s native compilation engine. We’re sure they’re coming, but right away it’s slim pickins.

Cameras

Again, the PlayBook has three megapixels up front and five across the back, enabling 1080p MPEG4 video recording in a tablet and, we must say, doing an even job of it. You’re going to need plenty of light but, if things aren’t too dim, video quality is incredibly good, as you’ll discover within the sample clip above. Images, too, want a lot of sunshine to maintain the grain monster at bay, and the shortage of a flash doesn’t assist in that department, but get the lighting right and the consequences are decent. Focus is sharp and pictures look bright. Here is definitely a tablet that you can use to take some attractive photographs, in case you can recover from the social repercussions of waving this seven-inch viewfinder around on vacation.

Accessories

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RIM kindly provided a number of accessories for us to experiment with, including the $50 Convertible Case, which adds a terrific amount of girth to the tablet but additionally offers loads of protection, and serves as a stand, too. But, $50 is lots of money for a case. (There’s, as a minimum, a skinny sleeve included with the PlayBook.)

We also received the Rapid Charging Pod, a $70 magnetic stand that uses that three-pronged proprietary charger on the bottom. It’s said to be twice as fast as micro-USB charging and its weighted, magnetic design holds the PlayBook firmly in place for watching content while charging. But, the shortage of audio output is unfortunate and, again, $70 looks like plenty for a tiny little dock.

Wrap-up

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Scripting this review has been lots like seeking to hit a moving target due to a sequence of software updates which have been dropping every few days. The PlayBook of today is considerably better than the PlayBook of yesterday, which also was a giant breakthrough from the only we were reviewing two days before that. It’s both encouraging and worrying — encouraging that RIM is actively working to enhance things, but worrying that things as critical as memory management are still being tweaked on the eleventh hour.

This suggests we’re not entirely sure what the PlayBook that goes on sale next week will appear to be. We thought we had “final” software on Sunday — after which we got another update. So, what we see at the present time is a framework with solid fundamentals but a framework this is, promptly, unfinished. We’ve got hardware that appears and feels great but isn’t being fully served by the software. And, ultimately, we’ve a tablet that’s trying really hard to delight the enterprise set but, in doing so, looks alienating casual users who might just need a really great seven-inch tablet. Oh, and don’t forget that bummer of an influence button.

Immediately, the BlackBerry PlayBook is a tablet come on the brink of satisfying those users who gravitate toward the primary word in its name: BlackBerry. Folks that were more all for the “play” part will be well advised to seem elsewhere, at the least until Android compatibility joins the party. Then, well, anything could happen.

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This post is tagged: corporate executives, last quarter, powerpoint presentations, rim blackberry, running software