The BlackBerry PlayBook Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi on April 13, 2011 9:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Tablets
- Smartphones
- RIM
- BlackBerry
- PlayBook
- Mobile
Apps and Development
Everyone loves to repeat Apple's iOS app number verbatim: "65,000 iPad apps and counting" was the talking point after the iPad 2 launch event. In reality, that's hundreds of times more than the number of apps you'll actually use on a regular basis. Most of the really popular apps are cross platform, at least when it comes to iOS and Android. There are definitely iOS exclusives just as there are Android exclusives, perhaps more of the former than the latter but ultimately I don't put too much weight on quantity of apps. If there's something in particular you want that doesn't exist for one platform but does for another, that's worth talking about.
The PlayBook app experience, at least on day one, unfortunately isn't anywhere near that of what you get on Honeycomb. So if you felt that Honeycomb was under-supported by 3rd party apps at launch, the PlayBook will disappoint you.
Let's first talk about App World - RIM's app catalog on the PlayBook. Apps are divided into categories and you can of course look at the top free, top purchased, newest and recently updated apps. I haven't encountered an app that needs updating so I'm not entirely sure how that process works yet.
Browsing for apps by category is a bit more complicated than I'd like. Each category seen in the screen below has a handful of subcategories:
I've noticed that app categorization doesn't always match up with the sub categories properly. There is of course full text search in App World, which seems to work well except that there just isn't that much to search for today.
One nice feature of the App World app is the My World page. Here you get a list of everything you've installed on the app (including size and version number) and you're given the option of deleting apps from here.
RIM also provides you with a list of apps you've deleted and gives you the option of reinstalling any of them. So if you deleted something you end up missing, you don't have to go searching for it again - it's just in the uninstalled tab in My World. Deleted/uninstalled apps don't physically reside on your device so they'll have to be re-downloaded, but the convenience is still nice.
You don't need to login with your BlackBerry ID to download free apps, but anything you have to purchase requires an authentication step.
App World is one of the few first party apps that just isn't very smooth. Animations are choppy and the whole thing just begs to be optimized. I can't stress enough how having a mixture of 60 fps and sub-30 fps frame rates on the same tablet somehow stands out more than if the device were just consistently below 30 fps.
RIM sent along a list of companies that are working on PlayBook apps, however I don't have specifics as to what they're working on or when it'll be released:
· Adobe Connect & Lifecycle
· Airplay
· Atari
· BoxTone
· Cerner Corporation
· Digital Chocolate
· EA
· eBay
· EpixHD
· Evernote
· FGL
· Fortune
· Gameloft
· Globe & Mail
· HFMUS - Car and Driver magazine
· Huffington Post
· Loblaws
· Mattel
· MediaFly
· OpenText Everywhere
· Post Media
· Salesforce.com - Chatter
· ScoreMedia (ScoreMobile)
· Slacker Radio
· Sports Illustrated
· Telicost (Anomalous Networks)
· The Weather Channel
· The Weather Network
· Time
· Unity3D
In terms of developing apps for the PlayBook you really have three options: the WebWorks SDK, BlackBerry Tablet OS SDK for Adobe AIR and native C/C++.
The WebWorks SDK enables HTML5 and JavaScript based apps to run on the PlayBook, similar to what the original apps for iOS were like. The Tablet OS SDK for Adobe AIR lets you bundle and target the PlayBook with apps you've built using Adobe Flash Builder. And finally, the highest performance option is to obviously write native C/C++ targeting the PlayBook.
There is a fourth method of getting apps onto the BlackBerry PlayBook, using an as-of-now unreleased Android App Player. RIM is working on a port of Android that will run on top of QNX, abstracted from the underlying hardware/software (think VM). The Android App Player should be able to run all apps that work on Gingerbread (Android 2.3). You won't get access to the Android marketplace, developers will still have to package and send all apps to RIM for signing - but it should allow existing Android developers to avoid a full blown code re-write in order to get their apps working on PlayBook right away.
It's still far too early to see how successful this is going to be and I do have concerns about performance (the layer between QNX and Android is bound to cause a performance impact). Of course Android apps won't have direct access to hardware so things like 3D games are likely going to be too slow to work at all. It's an interesting option but I'll reserve judgement until I see it implemented in a shipping device. At this point I wouldn't assume that the PlayBook is just going to give you a great Android app experience as well as a great PlayBook experience. I think that's simply too far fetched.
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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.