The spectacular demise of Hewlett-Packard’s TouchPad and the expected arrival of BlackBerry Tablet OS 2.0 should give Research In Motion’s PlayBook tablet a new lease of life. If you’ve tried one, you will have seen its party piece: playing gorgeous-looking videos — including Flash, H.264, DivX and WMV videos — on its sharp, bright 7-inch screen.
Since the PlayBook has real multi-tasking, it can also do more than one thing at once. In fact, the main screen shows all the programs it’s running, rather than icons for the ones you could run one at a time. All it needs is something like Windows Snap so you can see two programs running side by side, instead of just swiping between them. But that may come, along with other features that RIM didn’t have time to finish before the launch.
The thing is, RIM didn’t take the easy route of converting its mobile phone software for a bigger screen, which Apple did with the iPad and Google with the Honeycomb version of Android. Instead, it made a fresh start by buying the successful QNX real-time operating system, which it plans to move down to BlackBerry smartphones. This should have long-term benefits, but the cost is that RIM launched the PlayBook without some crucial applications. These include BlackBerry Messenger (due any day now), calendar, contacts, and email.
The temporary workaround is that you can link the PlayBook to a BlackBerry and display the smartphone’s content on the PlayBook’s bigger screen. And if you don’t have a BlackBerry, you can use websites instead. (The PlayBook does have icons for Gmail, Hotmail, AOL and Yahoo mail, but they’re not apps: they just take you to the sites in the WebKit browser.)
In its favour, the PlayBook provides the most desktop-like browsing experience I’ve seen on a tablet, with support for both Flash and HTML5. Against that, the web was designed for precise mice, not fumbly fingers. If you find sites hard to use on a touch-sensitive screen, you may prefer to wait for the apps….
Hardware
Fortunately, the PlayBook hardware makes a good impression straight out of the box. It’s thin (10mm), light (400g), and has plenty of connectivity, if not all the ports you might want.
The PlayBook is roughly the size of a spiral-bound reporters’ notebook, but not quite as tall. It fits my suit-jacket pockets perfectly, so, unlike the iPad, it really is easy to carry around. The drawback with the PlayBook’s 7-inch 16:9 widescreen is that it has the same resolution as a standard netbook: 1024 x 600 pixels (WSVGA). Pop up the software keyboard and you’re left with a letterbox view of web pages only about 300 pixels high.
Of course, you can also turn the PlayBook around and use it vertically. This makes the on-screen keyboard terrific for smartphone-style two-thumb typing, and means you can read columns of text easily, but now your web page is only 600 pixels wide.
The PlayBook has the two standard cameras, and as usual, they are better than the ones in the iPad 2. The front-facing webcam has a resolution of 3 megapixels for video chats, while the rear-facing camera delivers 5MP for snaps and videos. You can take high-definition (1080p) movies but only view them in full HD by using the microHDMI port to connect an external screen. The SD results are not camera quality but they’re not bad.
Connectivity is good. The PlayBook has Wi-Fi (802.11 a/b/g/n). Bluetooth (with tethering) and a microUSB port, so you can download and sideload content, if you buy the necessary cable. Sadly, it does not have an SD card slot, as fitted to my cameras, Edirol digital recorder and laptop. If I owned a PlayBook, I’d be hunting for a microUSB-to-SD card adapter.
And if you aren’t too busy with YouTube, BBC iPlayer or EA’s Tetris app, you can work. RIM provides Word To Go, Sheet To Go and Slideshow To Go, sourced from DataViz, so you can create documents offline. You can also log on to Hotmail and use the free online version of Microsoft’s Office with your free 25GB SkyDrive.
So, if you are a travelling business person who uses a BlackBerry smartphone, then the PlayBook looks like a good choice. It provides a user-friendly and pocketable way of reading and creating documents on the go, including voice notes. It has a great on-screen keyboard and it’s good for web browsing, bearing in mind the limitations of its 1024 x 600 pixel screen.
If your main uses are tweeting from the couch in front of the TV set, playing with apps, and reading in bed — in other words, a typical iPad user — it may not be the best choice. The iPad is almost 50 percent heavier and slightly less portable, but it has a bigger screen and a huge range of apps that the PlayBook lacks.
But it’s still early days. The PlayBook’s operating system will improve, and RIM could easily launch tablets with bigger (or smaller) screens. If it delivers BlackBerry apps while hoovering up the best Android apps, the PlayBook could be a contender.
