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 New Home
Like many things, when talking about home screens there's a spectrum of options. On the simplest end we've got Apple with iOS, and for the ultimate in complexity there's a full blown desktop OS like Windows or OS X. In between there's Android and somewhere between iOS and Android we have the PlayBook OS.
The default home screen is your typical grid of apps. You can collapse the grid down to a single row of six icons in landscape mode, or view the full grid. RIM provides five tabs to help sort through apps: All, Favorites, Media, Games and BlackBerry Bridge (the latter only appears if you have Bridge enabled).
There's no support for folders, although you can rearrange icons and uninstall apps directly from the home screen the same way you would under iOS.
App launches are unfortunately a bit high latency. Select an app and you'll first see it launch as a thumbnail, then zoom in and finally run full screen. The whole process takes a couple of seconds but it feels longer than firing up similar iOS or Honeycomb apps.
Above the app grid is the multitasking UI, although you need to have at least one active app to see it in action:
Multitasking is smooth and well executed on the PlayBook. To switch between active apps just swipe left to right (starting from the left or right bezel, inner-screen swipes are application specific). You can also swipe up from the bottom bezel (the unlock gesture) while you're in an app to bring up a horizontal list of thumbnails of currently running apps. When in this thumbnail view you can swipe left to right to scroll through the list of apps, flick up (or hit the x) to quit apps and tap on a thumbnail to select and switch to an app. It's all clearly very webOS inspired, although I will say that webOS still feels a bit better in this regard.
Apps continue to run while you're deciding what to switch to. For example, if you're playing a video the player thumbnail will continue to animate while you select your next app. Only once you've selected that app will the video player pause.
RIM also gives you the option to control how background apps behave. By default background apps are paused once you switch away from them, however you can set them to keep running all the time or pause immediately upon activating the task switcher.
Scrolling through running apps is (for the most part) very smooth, with the UI running at 60 fps. The multitasking UI is extremely well done and honestly one of the most impressive parts of the PlayBook experience.
Notifications
With no email or calendar apps, the PlayBook doesn't have a whole lot to notify you of. Presently the only notifications the PlayBook will deliver have to do with remaining battery capacity.
Notifications on the PlayBook work by coloring a corner of the screen (I've seen this happen in both the upper left and upper right corners) if you're in a full screen app. Use the peek gesture to reveal the status bar and you'll see a little icon representing the app that spawned the notification. As I just mentioned, the only notifications that exist today are from the OS telling you that your battery is low but ultimately you'll see notifications from other first and third party apps here.
PlayBook's notification system is clearly a work in progress. Currently if you're charging a fully discharged PlayBook you'll get a notification every 1% between 0 and 6% telling you that the battery is low as you charge it. Also the only notification color supported today is red, which works well for "hey you're running out of battery life!" but not so well for "hey you just got 3 emails".
The notification system on the PlayBook has the potential to be decent. I expect that RIM will tweak the notification system over the coming months to accommodate other applications and services using it. The foundation is solid and RIM seems to be listening to feedback so I have hope for this working well.
There's also a notification LED on the front of the PlayBook, to the left of the front-facing camera. Today all it does is glow red when you turn on the PlayBook, but you can eventually expect it to have more BlackBerry-like functionality as RIM rolls out other things that can notify you (think emails).
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gentrfunk - Saturday, April 16, 2011 - link
Hi Folks,Anyone have any info on how messages are passed back and forth between the kernel? I'm interested in the fact that microkernel systems typically had problems in some cases locking up the cue with multiple rapid input (e.g. mouse clicks, etc)...
any thoughts?
mavricxx - Tuesday, April 19, 2011 - link
The thing about this tablet is that you gotta give it time to mature. Right now is at its infant state where there are little apps, and the software is still being refined. I will say that the best thing about this tablet that sets it apart from Android is that you won't have different iterations of say Honeycomb 3.0 and having to wait forever for updates. One good thing RIM has going for it is its reputation for kicking out updates. Hopefully, it kicks it in turbo and lots of GOOD apps start coming out. Another thing I'd like to point out that NONE of the reviews have applauded RIM for is the standard MicroUSB charger which all phones use now a days. This is a big deal as if you happen to lose your charger its no big deal. I hope to see a lot of cool and useful gadgets for this device as well. One major thing I see that RIM screwed up besides the whole email/calendar/contacts thing was the absence of expandable memory; Had they added a FULL size SDXC card support they would have blown this thing to another level. A couple of things I'd like to see with the upcoming updates are: Free turn-by-turn Nav, universal search and maybe some full free FPS(Call of duty)/racing(need for speed)/action(Grand theft auto)/RTS(Company of heroes) games to make this thing worthwhile to buy. Lastly, I think RIM could have made this thing more desirable to purchase as well by including headphones, USB adaptor and an HDMI adaptor.worldbfree4me - Tuesday, April 19, 2011 - link
This year, Tablets will probably be only 2nd to HDTV's in Black Friday advertising. I like my iPad 1, but it is lacking in a lot of areas. I think that the features I crave on the HTC View (Stylus Input), Black Berry and HP WebOS (Bridge), and True Multitasking will eventually find their way onto the rest of the pack and by this time next year we will finally see complete Tablets with I/O galore (HDMi Mirroring,USB 3.0, BT 3.0, MicroSD etc). With Amazon leading the Cloud Storage Charge, on device storage will become not so this keeping retail prices nominal. Even right now because of my distrust in Apples’ walled garden. I have no Music or Videos stored locally on my iPad. Sugar Sync, Evernote, Drop Box, and of course Gmail rounds out my storage albeit virtually.Thanks for another great analysis!
mblair - Wednesday, April 20, 2011 - link
The RIM playbook is a game changer. The slick, easy to use interface and true multi-tasking make it a dream to use. Its Flash execution is flawless. I was surprised how many times I needed Flash. It made my Ipad almost useless some of the time.The best feature for me is Blackberry Bridge. A Wi-Fi tablet but with my blackberry in my pocket and Bluetooth, I can operate 3G. I can't do that with my Wi-Fi only Ipad! And I don't need two user accounts or an extra monthly fee.
It did not take me long to get used to the Blackberry paradigm. Now I take it everywhere, it is small enough to be truly portable. Battery life is OK, not spectacular but pretty good. The video rendering is world class.
I use gmail so the browser is all I want or need most of the time. I have my Blackberry for email from work and when tied to the Playbook I can use the larger screen seamlessly. The Playbook gives me all I want.
Good bye Apple. It has been a slice.
I love it. I have given my son the Ipad. He wants a Playbook. Maybe later.
Michael Blair
Shadowmaster625 - Friday, April 22, 2011 - link
This is a screenshot from a flash game running on IE9: http://grab.by/9WxQThere are huge gray sections that are failing to render or whatnot. The sections grow over time. It looks really bad. This doesn't happen on firefox. But the game does run faster on IE9, for whatever that is worth... obviously not much.
exprimarelibera - Monday, July 18, 2011 - link
I bought one today, more than four months after this article and still no email application available. I'm pretty disappointed, after all that's what made RIM what they are.http://www.exprimarelibera.ro/2011/review-m-am-juc...
No Netflix Streaming - Sunday, November 27, 2011 - link
This tablet DOES NOT STREAM NETFLIX. The Netflix app only queues discs. Contact Blackberry Before You Buy and Demand a Netflix Streaming App.