Blackberry Playbook Review

dukzdenkz
By -
0
Blackberry Playbook
Blacberry Playbook-To say that the BlackBerry guidelines - and a review of the Playbook - is something of an event that is anticipated to be underestimated. From the first time the technology community caught wind (and see) from Research In Motion's first foray into the tablet world, everyone seems to be on pins and needles. It's not just that other companies are making the cost of the Apple iPad - it's also that RIM has been on something of late binding. Company once unassailable market share has slipped away to watch in the IOS and Android, due at least in part to the current crop of new devices and OS that leaves much to be desired. But RIM is not sitting still, either; phone-makers have been snapping up Canadian software companies such as QNX and TAT impressive UI team, all in the service of supercharging the next cycle of BlackBerry products. And the guidelines were ... ahem, the fruits of their labor.

As RIM's first tablet, but also the first of its products to promote a completely different OS and the underlying architecture, the guidelines may symbolize the rebirth of the company to today's world - a world where only the first does not mean you are the best (or most loved). So is the 7-inch slate all cracked up to be? Is this a time when RIM save itself? Or, if the guidelines are too little, too late? All these questions - and more - are answered in my full review, so read on!

Note: In February, 2012, OS Playbook has been updated to version 2.0. Among other things, the guidelines add 2.0 email client for the device, and supports Android applications through a custom player. Be sure and check out our review of the updated software here!


Hardware
Playbook TABLET IS A LITTLE sleek and stylish

You can see the hardware manual in two ways. The first one (my own), is that it is a small tablet is very sleek and stylish, sturdy and smart without decoration - a demonstration of utilitarian chic. The second view, taken by my good friend Chris Ziegler at first see it up close, is that it looks like a picture frame $ 99 you might find on the shelves of Walmart. We obviously disagree on the design of the device industry.

For my money, I think most of RIM have made the right decision with these guidelines. 7-inch rectangle is - as stated - rather odd, but it's nice to see, and fun to hold in your hand. Most of the tablet (the back and sides) is covered in smooth, soft-touch materials, while consuming the front glass screen slate. Hiding on both sides of the glass that a set of speakers, front-facing camera, and light sensor. Along the bottom of the device you will find a mini HDMI port, Micro USB, and dock connector, while at the top you have the power / sleep very little, and the volume rocker switch pause / play sandwiched in the middle. On the back there is a little more than a silver BlackBerry logo and a 5 megapixel camera.

This tablet is 7.6 inches wide (in landscape) by 5.1 inches tall, and has a thickness of only 0.4 inches, so it is quite slim. Playbook weighs 0.9 pounds (compared with iPad 2 is 1.33 pounds and 1.6 pounds in Xoom's), so it's quite a lot on your hands even with a smaller size.

Slate is highly desirable
Everything works on this design ... except the power button, which not only small, but almost impossible to relax press. You might think that it is a positive feature, but not when you try to wake up or put it Playbook to sleep - I have to dig my nails into the button with considerable force every time I want to activate it. It's as if nothing had ever tested hardware before sending it to production - this is the horrible design flaw in the otherwise well executed product. It's not a dealbreaker, but it is a constant source of annoyance when using the tablet.

Overall, however, the Playbook looks and feels better than holding its own against competitors like the iPad 2 or Xoom. While not nearly as thin as the first, and not as big and strong as the last one, a combination of materials, shapes, and the general layout makes slate a very desirable thing for geeks and non-geeks alike. Just do not cut your nails too much.

Tablet Blackberry Playbook


Internal / show / performance
IF DEVICES ARE PUT TOGETHER A GOOD sharp and

Perhaps it comes as little surprise to some that RIM is actually equipped with hardcore Playbook relative set of specifications. Given the latest addition to the family as the torch woefully underpowered, this is a pleasant surprise. Inside you will find the slate, a 1GHz dual-core TI OMAP 4430 CPU, 1GB of RAM, and flash storage configurations of 16GB, 32GB, or 64GB (I tested the 32GB model). As you would expect a typical radio you get compliments, including 802.11a/b/g/n WiFi, Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR, and onboard GPS chip. There WiMAX, LTE, and HSPA + version of the Playbook to happen, but now you can buy models that are WiFi-only.

The display device is 1024 x 600 capacitive touchscreen that sports pretty bright, vibrant colors and deep, dark black range. The resolution does not seem restrictive, but it was helped by the fact that RIM is relying on many smaller fonts - especially in bridge applications. Users with poor vision may have some difficulty with some of the smaller text on the screen, but I prefer daintier font. Touch sensitivity is very good in most cases, although the new rhythm-based QNX OS seems to be tuned for a more relaxed experience, making things feel a bit more sluggish than I suspect they really are (more on this in the software).

External audio to the Playbook is something of a revelation. Since RIM provides not one but two speakers, you get full stereo when using the device in landscape mode (the preferred orientation for this OS). I was surprised by how good the sound when playing music or watching video. If you throw it on the dock near the bed, you've got the perfect companion for the evening of music and audio books. I am also pleased to discover that the device not only sports a stereo playback, but it has two microphones, allowing for some interesting audio recording options. When it comes to sound quality, blows away the competition close guidance from the iPad 2 and Xoom - it sounds much better.

In my testing, the combo that dual-core CPU and architecture of QNX seems to fulfill all the promises of speed and flexibility that the RIM has been touting. There are no real benchmarks to run on the platform at the moment, but I can say that the guidelines was very sharp in most scenarios. Apps open quickly, and switching between programs is really active at once. The camera has a bit of lag when taking pictures, and 1080p video playback worked without incident. The most prominent - and something I will dive deeper into the software - Playbook shows signs of a struggle with almost no full Flash content, even 720p and 1080p YouTube clip, and it's something I can not say nearly all the other tablets in market.

Overall, RIM has done a fantastic job on the front of the hardware. The device feels sharp and also to collect, screen looks great, and sounds best in its class. This is not breaking new ground as far as tablets go real, but more than enough to be competitive now.

Android

Blackberry

Battery

The battery life is exceptional in the guidelines. In my testing, which runs in a loop with a video display set to 65 percent brightness, WiFi, the battery lasted almost 11 hours - an extraordinary period for this type of device. Of course, in the cell 5300mAh has not hurt anything.

In common usage, I find comparable guidelines in the performance of the battery with its nearest competitor (iPad 2 and Xoom); actually bests iPad in video playback, and the numbers will only climb higher if you were to tweak the brightness further and kill the WiFi.

Camera


Guidelines for exercise two shooters - front-facing camera 3 megapixel camera, and the rear cam which has a 5 megapixel sensor. Both cameras are fixed focus, which is an immediate disappointment for me. This is the first tablet (except maybe the Galaxy Tab) to feel like you could probably get away with using it as a camera or video camera - but a lack of focus to take really great pictures almost impossible.

On the back of the camera, the clarity and color reproduction is very good general, and photographing in bright room or daylight is easy. When it came to light under the arrangement, however, I feel like there is a large amount of visual noise - enough to make me want to avoid situations. Since there is no flash is present, you do not really have much choice here. Overall, the quality of shooters expect a decent smartphone, not amazing, but not terrible (and far superior to anything like the iPad 2), although hampered by the lack of auto focus and flash.

Front of the camera, while a higher resolution than most other tablets out there, do not run much better in low light - but I do not expect to use that gunner to do anything except video calls (and to apply my makeup). Interestingly, there is no software on the guidelines that allow for video calling, so that the front camera is a bit useless at this time. RIM said it will offer video applications call the post-launch as part of OTA software updates, and the company has the expectation that the third party will give some options as well. While it is surprising that RIM will send Playbook without taking advantage of the front of the camera, in the context of this tablet, it is sadly par for the course. That is, many here feel has not been completed.


Software


SOFTWARE'S Feels unfinished Playbook

While Playbook significantly from a hardware perspective, the important thing here is brand new Research In Motion introduced the OS. Built on the QNX platform supposedly rock-solid, tablet operating system is a new beginning for the company, touting a completely revamped look and feel, and a new application framework, including support for native development, Adobe Air, Java, and WebWorks RIM ... oh, and Android as well, as the virtual machine at least.

The underlying architecture is not only new, but the user interface has been built as well, and now features at least a growing number of recently acquired TAT. It's quite clear The Astonishing Tribe has been working in the OS guidelines, and there are lots of cute little touches that make this device feel much more refined and modern from RIM has done something for a long time.

General UI / LOOK AND FEEL
To understand the Playbook UI, you just need to really understand the Palm (and now HP) webOS. This interface tablet owes much favored competitors, but the most obvious is the way in which the UI is concerned with multitasking, application switching, and task management. When you first boot the Playbook, you are presented with a homescreen that is not wildly different from the BlackBerry OS 6. At the top of the screen is a status bar with icons, the orientation of the time and date of the lock, Bluetooth controls, WiFi indicator, battery indicator, and settings. Below is a space for your application when it runs - the applications in view "cards" that can navigate left to right, like Cover Flow. Under that section is a drawer for your application that can be raised and lowered with the swipe of a finger. Applications are then grouped into categories depending on their tab.

There are five movements that allow you to navigate the OS. A slide up from the bottom panel while the application will take you to the display card (and your homescreen), whereas the same movement on the display card will bring up your application drawer and close it. A swipe down from the top of the panel while in an application will reveal more chrome, allowing you to explore the option or make another choice (in the browser, for example, display the tabs and icons options). If you do a swipe down on the homescreen, you get a dropdown menu of all tablet settings. While in the application, swipe left or right of the panel will take you to another application, while swiping down from the right or left upper corner will reveal the status bar. A swipe from the bottom left corner displays the keyboard. In addition to a special motion, the guidelines feature pinch-to-zoom on the browser, maps, and photo viewer.

Tablet Reviews

Getting around in OS intuitive and elegant, but honestly, webOS do a better job with managing the card, either in the nuances of moving through them and with the new stack feature in webOS 2.0, which lets you group related activities. Odd, Playbook has a sense of inertia over-flowing, as if RIM does not turn down physics, so when you're flipping through the cards you are missing that you want to choose and he went flying by you. In general, the OS feels like it's guidance on the ice of a Mega Man game - it all seems to glide far beyond your control. It was sloppy, and it is compounded by the fact that the OS does not seem to be fully optimized for touch input, but, I find myself re-pressing and pressing on the UI elements and navigate the web without success. In web applications like Gmail (which RIM provides direct links to the homescreen), I did not get to a specific message check box even after double-digit efforts. Whether it is acting as a whole train UI or problems with the way the browser interprets the touch is not clear, but the kind of behavior that makes the product was not finished.

On the plus side, the OS shows great promise, and a touch UI that TAT has been brought to the table is really charming, like the calculator function of your history that you almost can rip off to get rid of. Other places you see the brilliance of TAT peeking through the photo browser, in which the image is not only scroll left to right, but overlapping, and all the other shadows. It's those kinds of details that breathe life into this device, and point the way toward a brighter future for RIM - unfortunately, there just is not enough to go around now.

BLACKBERRY BRIDGE / EMAIL / CALENDAR


Blackberry playbook-One of the most surprising omission in this guide is the fact that there is no native email, calendar, or contacts to the outside of the box. The only way at the launch for the use of these services is to pair the device with a BlackBerry handset via Bluetooth, using a protocol called for RIM BlackBerry Bridge. I only had time to test this function, such as early versions of the software Playbook does not have access to Bridge mode.

First, it is inconceivable to me that the people at RIM thought it was a smart play to cut non-BlackBerry users from the most basic functions you'd expect on a device of this type. Unable to access email via the original client is madness as far as I know, and the first few days I've got the guidelines without email, contacts, or my calendar, the feeling is almost useless.

Once the bridge is enabled, the shared content is relatively easy to work with, although I see some problems. For starters, if you use Gmail users RIM Gmail Plugin, you will be lucky in the guidelines - that your message format standard BlackBerry-style (no threading, no stars, no label). More frustrating is the fact that apparently there is a lag between when you delete or move messages to the guidelines and when they actually handled on the phone and server. I had some worrying moments at the beginning where I could not put out an email - header just sitting in my inbox, empty but unmovable. I finally had to reconcile the message on my torch to get them cleaned. That does not mean that implementation is clunky - no - but not exactly perfect. It is unclear why RIM does not only allow you to connect your account information on the device itself, but I assume it has something to do with the company's high standards of safety. Very nice of them to think about it, but for most users, the lack of an easy choice for the email would be more disturbing than security issues. Even for current BlackBerry users, it looks like not directly to get your important content.

And to fuel your fanatical, some bad news. At this time point, the bridge requires that the new version of the fuel used to convey their messages on your Playbook ... so that the functionality of your new tablet is in the hands of RIM now, and it is unclear whether that will be addressed by the launch date.

BROWSER
Playbook Browser is a variation of the modified and improved in WebKit-powered versions of the new Torch - and it's come a long way. For starters, most pages I visit on a perfect display device, a tablet-enhanced sites like Gmail displays as they do on the iPad. Page load time is sharp, and scrolling and pinch-to-zoom works perfectly, although sometimes there was apparently some of the sluggishness UI / offended that I mentioned earlier.

What is most impressive about the browser guidelines, however, is that it may be the first mobile web browser I have ever used that actually handle the flash properly. In fact, this is as close as you can get the experience of flash desktop / laptop tablet - at least with the video. That means full 1080p playback of YouTube in the browser without a stutter, no lag, and no slowdown in the overall device. Unfortunately, these guidelines are not so adept at handling the types of Flash content, such as gaming - in fact, most online Flash game I tried playing far too slow to have real fun with. It's clear that RIM has been optimized around the video playback (it's hardware acceleration), and that's good, but it still does not prove the Flash that works for mobile devices.



Music / Video / HDMI out
IT'S NOT IPOD, that's for sure

Music and video players in the guidelines is barebones but handsome. You will not find a surprise here, but they look good and get the job done to handle the content. RIM has signed a partnership with 7Digital more in the music service, and the company now offers a dedicated music store to the guidelines. This is a nice addition, and the price and selection seems comparable to other services out there.

The ability to play 1080p content on the device is quite good, and because you can easily install HDMI mini cable to the TV directly from your device, you can quickly get your content to the big screen. Of course, that means you need a long cable, or do not mind getting up to make changes to the device. RIM said that they had come to the dock multimedia guide (along with ways to control tablets distance), but now if you want to use your guide as a media center, you run the cable and go hands-on.




Third-party applications
MOST OF THIRD PARTY APPS ARE AWFUL


I'll just put this as clearly as I can: the majority of third-party applications I tested it while using the guidelines just horrible. It's pretty clear that many of the 3400 application to be available at the time of the launch titles are converted Flash and Air, and many are really not ready for primetime, they are not really developed with the touch screen in mind.

I will not go into specifics on the application that is the worst of the lot, although I have to show some. Specifically, Google Reader GeeReader clients, who simply can not be used, and the game seems to jetfighter-based Java, which has controls on the screen but no multitouch functionality, which means that you can not move and shoot at the same time ... that would be fine if this weren'ta top-down shooter. Other applications include the icon problem that does not appear, slow performance, and overall sense that many of these titles have been rushed into RIM's App World.

There are some bright spots, however. Tetris native code and the Need For Speed: Undercover are both solid, and Cardster memory game works pretty well. I also enjoy Vector Runner, which has a throwback, a retro look and feel - although I'm puzzled why the devs did not enter the accelerometer for control.

Overall, the selection of applications and functionality leaves much to be desired. In terms of wow factor, not here in about GarageBand for the iPad, or Angry Birds on any platform. There is no one single piece of software on the platform I saw that show me how it's better than existing products such as Xoom or iPad - in fact, quite the opposite effect. Even Kobo, an e-reader, feel more sluggish and less intuitive to the guidelines of the other tablets. I would say that RIM is coming out of the gate with more specific applications of Google tablets do to Xoom ... but the quantity not quality, and it clearly shows here.



Video review




Wrap-up
I DO NOT KNOW WHY YOU WOULD BUY THIS AN iPad MORE, AND I DO NOT THINK RIM IS NOT GOOD
Let me say first and foremost that the guidelines were a really solid device with a handsome and clean industrial design, a large and powerful set of specifications, and new operating system that shows tons of promise. RIM has really delivered in many areas here, proving that as a company can do much more than just a utilitarian smartphones. Value of the acquisition of both QNX and TAT are clearly represented in this product, and it is clear that this is just the beginning of a long relationship between the companies. Clear relationship can yield great results. In addition, the guidelines at the right price - from $ 499 for the 16GB version (and $ 100 with each additional 16GB), it is clear in that ballpark.

But Playbook does not hit home runs first. OS is still buggy and somewhat sensitive. Third-party applications is a desert now, if not in number, then certainly in quality. Lack of native email and calendar support hospital. The worst part, however, is that I can not think of a single reason to recommend this tablet for 2 iPad, or in this case ... Xoom is. And that's what really boils down to here, what an interesting feature that will make buyers choose the Playbook for something else? I do not have that answer, but it's not what's troubling me - what my problem is that I do not think RIM has a good answer ... and they have now.


Specification Blackberry Playbook:

General:
Released:19/04/2011
Form Factor:Slate
Hardware Keyboard:No
Size
Width:7.6 inches
Height:5.1 inches
Depth:0.4 inches
Weight:14.4 ounces
Display
Type:
Capacitive
Technology:TFT LCD
Size:7.0 inches
Resolution:1024x600px
Camera
Megapixels:5 MP
Autofocus:?
Flash:No
Megapixels:5 MP
Video Quality:1080p
Video FPS:30
Secondary Camera
(Front Facing)
Megapixels:3 MP
Autofocus:?
Flash:?
Video Quality:?
Connectivity
Bluetooth:Yes
Bluetooth Types:EDR
USB:MicroUSB
Wifi:802.11b/g/n
GPS:Yes
Multimedia
Headset Jack:3.5mm
Speakerphone:?
FM Tuner:?
Browser:?
Battery
Type:?
Capacity:5300 mAh
Removable:No
OS
Version:
BlackBerry OS
Custom UI:?
Hardware
Internal Memory:16,32,64 GB
External Memory:No
RAM:1GB
Processor:TI
Processor Speed:1 GHz
MicroUSB
Wifi:802.11b/g/n
GPS:Yes
Multimedia
Headset Jack:3.5mm
Speakerphone:?
FM Tuner:?
Browser:?
Battery
Type:?
Capacity:5300 mAh
Removable:No
OS
Version:
BlackBerry OS
Custom UI:
?
Hardware
Internal Memory:16,32,64 GB
External Memory:No
RAM:1GB
Processor:TI
Processor Speed:1 GHz

Post a Comment

0Comments

Post a Comment (0)

#buttons=(Ok, Go it!) #days=(20)

Our website uses cookies to enhance your experience. Check Now
Ok, Go it!