RIM did a good job on the user guide side as well: when you first start the Playbook, an animation is launched to show how the gestures work with the user interface.
Tablet with no support for GSM voice communication, SMS, and MMS.
This is not a GSM device, it will not work on any GSM network worldwide.
- Dimensions : 194 x 130 x 10 mm
- weight : 425g
- TFT capacitive touchscreen, 16M colors, 600 x 1024 pixels, 7.0 inches
- Multi-touch input method
- Accelerometer sensor for auto-rotates
- Memory internal : 16/32/64 GB storage, 1 GB RAM
- Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n
- USB microUSB v2.0
- Primary camera 5 MP, 2592x1944 pixels, autofocus
- Secondary camera : 3 MP
- 1GHz dual-core Cortex-A9 CPU, PowerVR SGX540 GPU, TI OMAP 4430 chipset
- Browser HTML
- Support flash 10.1
- Micro HDMI port
- Blackberry tablet OS
- Standard battery, Li-Po 5300 mAh
The words "play" and "book" are a bit of an odd choice for RIM's latest attempt at consumer relevance, a tablet that, at its core, runs one of the most hardcore and industry-friendly operating systems known to man. The OS is ONX and the hardware is, of course, the BlackBerry PlayBook. It's an enterprise-friendly offering that's also out to conquer the consumer tablet ecosphere, hoping to follow in the footsteps of the BlackBerry handsets that have filled the pockets of corporate executives and BBM addicts around the globe.
It's something of a serious tablet when compared to the competition running software from Apple and Google and, while it certainly has games, its biggest strengths are rather more boring. It does a really great job at displaying PowerPoint presentations, for example, and has the security chops to keep last quarter's dismal sales figures from falling into the wrong hands. Exciting stuff? No, but useful features for sure, and regardless of whether you find those intriguing or boring this is 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.
Connectivity
There are various flavors of 4G coming down the pipe for the PlayBook later this year, including a WiMAX sampler for Sprint as well as HSPA+ and LTE for... well, for other carriers. That leaves us with 802.11a/b/g/n connectivity, plus Bluetooth of course. Using that last standard you can pair up a keyboard and mouse; do so and a microscopic cursor appears on the screen. Left clicks for taps and right-clicks for gestures, initiated at the edge of the screen rather than 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 can't just plug it in to your laptop and dump a bunch of files on it. You can mount it as a drive over USB, but then you have only access to a small, read-only volume that contains a single driver. Install that and the PlayBook shows up as a network drive.
Deliciously, this driver allows you to access the device over the network or connected directly over USB, but if you're rocking something other than a Mac or a PC you're going to be disappointed the first time you try to tether here. And, with no simple mass storage mode, it's far more complicated that it should be if you just want to get a file off the thing.
Battery life
With day-to-day usage, WiFi on, screen reasonably bright, checking out some websites and playing some tunes, the PlayBook has plenty of juice to get you through a couple days without breaking a sweat. It'll handily survive your all-day presentation at the office, make you look cool in front of your boss, then still have plenty of battery life left to chill out to some N.W.A. on the flight home.But, compared to the competition, it delivers a solid mid-pack performance. We looped a standard MPEG4 video clip with WiFi enabled and screen brightness at about 65 percent, managing seven hours and one minute before everything went dark. That's about an hour more than the Samsung Galaxy Tab, but over an hour less than the Motorola Xoom. The iPad 2, meanwhile, manages ten and a half hours when similarly stressed.
| Battery Life | |
| RIM BlackBerry PlayBook | 7:01 |
| Apple iPad 2 | 10:26 |
| Apple iPad | 9:33 |
| Motorola Xoom | 8:20 |
| Dell Streak 7 | 3:26 |
| Archos 101 | 7:20 |
| Samsung Galaxy Tab | 6:09 |
Keyboard
At first blush, the keyboard on the PlayBook seems quite good. In landscape mode the keys are spread wide but still reachable by thumbs if you hold this tablet by its horizontal extents -- well, if you don't have particularly short thumbs, anyway. Flipped into portrait it's an even easier reach, but obviously a bit more precision is required.Blackberry Bridge
Bridge was one of the last pieces of the puzzle to come together in the PlayBook, added mere hours ago, and it's one of the strongest yet weakest aspects of the device. Here you pair your PlayBook up with a phone running BlackBerry OS 5 or 6, which must itself be running the Bridge app. The two talk sweet nothings over Bluetooth and, once connected, a new suite of applications is enabled on the tablet.
In this way you get your standard productivity stuff: e-mail, calendar, contacts, tasks, and memos. There's also an option to run the Bridge Browser, viewing the web through the phone interface, but as of this moment that feature is simply busted -- the app crashed every time we tried it. The other apps, though, are good. Simple. They're exactly what BlackBerry smartphone users are going to want, but they're also exactly what non-BlackBerry smartphone users will want and, if you don't have a phone to pair, they disappear.
Yes, you can get to your web mail provider of choice here, but the lack of dedicated, basic productivity applications like these feels like a huge oversight. This is RIM expecting 100 percent crossover between PlayBook buyers and current BlackBerry owners, and that seems unnecessarily limiting.
Blackberry playbook demo
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