The BlackBerry PlayBook Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi on April 13, 2011 9:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Tablets
- Smartphones
- RIM
- BlackBerry
- PlayBook
- Mobile
A Functional Bezel
The PlayBook supports all of the basic gestures we've come to expect from mobile devices with a capacitive touchscreen. There's flick to scroll, pinch to zoom and pretty much anything else you'll encounter on an iOS or Android based device. What RIM adds with the PlayBook are gestures that originate in the bezel of the device.
Any gestures within the 7-inch LCD area control the currently running app. Any gestures that originate in the bezel around the screen however are a different story. The first is the unlock gesture. Swipe up/down, left/right or the opposite direction when the PlayBook is asleep and you'll wake it up. There's no support for passcode locking and no physical unlock switch (although the power button will work in a pinch) - all you need to do is take one finger starting from a point on the bezel and slide it up or across. I've noticed that you have to be pretty committed when unlocking, anything less than swiping up/across 50% of the screen won't register as an unlock swipe. I suspect this is to ensure that no accidental swipes unlock the PlayBook when in your pocket/purse/othercavity.
Once unlocked, a swipe up from the bottom bezel will do one of two things depending on the state of the PlayBook. If you're at the home screen, swiping up from the bottom bezel brings up the entire app launcher instead of just the top row of apps. If you're in an app, a swipe up will reduce the active app to a thumbnail, expose the webOS-style task switcher and display a part of the home screen.
Swipe from the top bezel downward within an app and you'll either reveal a contextual menu for the app or you'll pull down the system settings page.
What about the left/right bezel? That's what you use to quickly switch between apps of course. Imagine an infinitely wide desktop where your viewport is big enough to hold on full screen app. To get to any active (even paused) app to the left or right of what you're currently looking at, just swipe left (or right) beginning in the bezel and you'll swap apps. If you only have one app running the OS will try to animate your current app sliding away but it'll bounce back, as if to tell you that you've reached the end of the horizontal list.
The bezel gestures don't stop there. Swipe up from the lower left corner and you'll bring up the PlayBook's virtual keyboard, in any app. This is a particularly puzzling gesture because you can bring up the keyboard even in apps that can't use a keyboard. And no, the keyboard shortcuts from the BlackBerry OS don't work on the PlayBook.
The lower right corner doesn't do anything but swipe from either of the upper two corners and you activate what RIM calls the peek gesture. The peek gesture gives you a quick look at the top status bar - including any notifications, date/time and battery status.
The bezel based gestures work well on the PlayBook although I'm not sure how long term of a solution this will be. Users tend to prefer thinner bezels - a direction I ultimately see all tablets going.
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Andrew911tt - Thursday, April 14, 2011 - link
You have the Xoom at a price of $799 but you can get the 32 GB wifi version for $599http://www.amazon.com/MOTOROLA-XOOM-Android-Tablet...
MTN Ranger - Thursday, April 14, 2011 - link
Excuse my off topic question.Anand, I notice you use Lafayette Village in your videos a lot. Do you live/work near there? We enjoy having drinks at the Village Grill and my wife loves the Upper Crust Bakery. I have taken photos there and think the architecture is great.
Anand Lal Shimpi - Thursday, April 14, 2011 - link
I'm not too far from there. It's the most interesting thing that I can photograph quickly outside of my dogs playing :)Take care,
Anand
jensend - Thursday, April 14, 2011 - link
I'm serious- this is probably the best commercial OS out there. Of course, these days most people judge an OS mostly by its included applications and the collection of software written for it, which doesn't look so good for QNX, but as far as the actual OS is concerned QNX is extremely well designed.baba264 - Friday, April 15, 2011 - link
I would tend to agree.I was very impressed upon reading all the nice features that this OS has and that are still lacking in mainstream PC OS.
The the tight kernel, the sandboxing, the thread management, the corruption protection all of it sounded real nice. Of course since it wasn't the focus of the article, many question remain, especially performance wise, still it sounded like an impressive work.
vision33r - Friday, April 15, 2011 - link
Because people are used to the iPhone / iPad and App Store being the standard.QNX is a good OS, it is tight and lean. There won't be a fragmentation problem like Android has.
The only problem is that RIM will restrict the device's functionality so that it cannot replace a Blackberry device and risk losing lucrative smartphone sales.
B3an - Friday, April 15, 2011 - link
"You can't really hover to expose controls with a touchscreen so what you end up doing is a lot of quick tapping to try and bring up controls, change the setting you want and get back to playing the video. It's frustrating and doesn't work all of the time. None of this is RIM's fault, but now that tablets are at the point where they can start to behave like notebook/desktops web developers will have to rethink the way they build websites. "I'm a web designer and specialise in interactive websites and apps, but touch screens have the ability to hold this area back and make it less elegant/messy for other devices with no touch.
The problem is not with web sites designed for non-touch devices but the need for a touch device to support hover in some way. For instance this could be done if a touch screen could detect a finger hovering over an area of the screen within say half an inch of the screen surface. That could work well if done right.
As sites get more interactive and advanced hover controls in the UI make more and more sense. because of interface complexity rises and the need for more buttons and stuff all over the place.
The thing with Flash is that being as it's far more capable than HTML5 for interaction (and with pretty much anything else too) is that it's Flash that is more likely to use hover controls in some form. But some HTML5 things are stating to use it, like the default skinned Chrome HTML5 video player for instance. Hover just makes perfect sense for certain things and touch screens need to fix this, not us web designers.
ElementFire - Friday, April 15, 2011 - link
This is a seriously well-wrought review. I'm especially glad you dedicated an entire section to Bridge, and addressed the free tethering question. As you stated, this is huge (assuming the carriers permit it), as it's the closest thing to truly unlimited browsing data plans (for no additional charge!) as we'll get now.It's a pity that Android apps need to be re-signed by RIM before they'll run. It makes sense from a security perspective (you don't want malicious apps running amok on an enterprise platform), but I'd have preferred if RIM had severely limited Android VM capability and allowed all apps to *try* to run, rather than requiring re-signing; the vast majority of Android app-developers won't have the impetus to resubmit their apps to yet another platform holder.
The last point I wanted to make was video conferencing: it's a serious letdown to only ship with point-to-point video chat (and even then, only between PlayBook owners!). If you're aiming at the enterprise, I'd expect VoIP/SIP capability and the ability to run WebEx natively. Does the PlayBook support any implementation of Java Runtime Environment?
name99 - Saturday, April 16, 2011 - link
"Pretty much no smartphone or tablet we've tested is particularly speedy over WiFi. Even the Motorola Xoom, at the top of our performance chart, manages a meager 36Mbps. Part of this has to do with the fact that all of these devices are power rather than performance optimized and part of it has to do with NAND performance limitations."Is this not simply a reflection that none of these devices use 40MHz wide channels, they all stick to 20MHz wide channels? I'm not certain about this, but given how the numbers cluster, I would bet this is the case.
(And, of course, none of these devices use multiple antennas for wifi.)
The flash has nothing to do with it. iPad flash can write sustained at a little under 20MB/s (ie 160 Mbs/s) and I imagine other tablets have similar specs.
In theory, the most power efficient way to run wifi is to do get your transmissions done as fast as possible --- in other words use 40MHz and multiple antennas and run at the maximum data rate possible. Of course this requires that the chips being used be maximally efficient in their overhead, so that essentially all power is being burned in RF transmit, not in the receivers, the decode logic and so on. It may well be that the chips supporting 40MHz, let alone MIMO, simply haven't been around for long enough to have their power usage tuned to where the 20MHz chips are.
tipoo - Sunday, April 17, 2011 - link
Most routers and laptops will default to 20MHz anyways.