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The future is bright if the Playbook is a sign of times to come, 16 Jun 2011

First a quick shot of context. I work with technology and test products for business suitability. I love Android for its open standards and I like IOS as an innovative technology despite disliking its proprietary stance. Both struggle as viable everyday business tools.

In the last years I have become increasingly disenchanted with RIM, the manufacturers of Blackberry devices and this Playbook. Despite a wider range of Blackberry products, finding a single one that covers each of the smartphone basics well, is hard. They have so far done a woeful job of producing a workable touchscreen device. The clunky, crash prone Torch being the best.

So we come to the Blackberry Playbook, RIM’s Wifi and Bluetooth only, non upgradeable, 7″ touchscreen tablet that runs the all new (to RIM) QNX OS. I wasn’t expecting much I have to say, perhaps something along the lines of the Storm, which had some great ideas wrapped in an unworkable concept. I was loaned a Playbook for two weeks by T-Mobile and the surprise when I actually got to using it, despite a few obvious limitations, was that it’s beautifully slick and a very usable device indeed. It works extremely well as a standalone touchscreen with incredible multi-tasking and is a great tool for anyone that ever wished their Blackberry had a bigger screen. There are caveats I will touch on, but if you’re looking for me to tell you its rubbish and not to buy one, I honestly cannot. It’s actually really rather good. My advise would to be buy the one with the biggest amount of internal storage you can afford. That is the only difference between the different models as they cannot be upgraded with additional storage once you have them.

So what’s the playbook like? For a start it does not run the Blackberry OS, it runs the QNX OS, which is a brand new engine and interface that will eventually be used across all RIM devices. QNX is legacy technology that has proven to be extremely efficient and it is no different here. The interface is super slick, with running apps displayed on screen in a horizontally rolling card file of windows that show live information. So if you’re watching a movie for instance and come back to the menu, the movie will continue playing in a window as you flick through your open apps. Displayed in this way the open apps are similar in style but more dynamic than the widgets you find in Android devices. It is only when you actually select and start using a app in fullscreen that the others drop back, and in this example, the video would pause.

Internet browsing on this is a real dream. Contempory to Apple IOS devices except it fully supports Flash and pages load (given internet connection speeds) very fast. There is none of the slow page builds or unresponsiveness you sometimes get in Android. I watched iPlayer and other online content with no issues and easily browsed busy media intense pages. I did occasionally find Flash content would not play and suspect this is a Flash version issue at the source website that will be better handled by RIM in the future.

Because QNX is a new OS then NONE of the existing Blackberry Apps will work on it. Any app that will run on the Playbook has to be written for the Playbook. And while there is talk of supporting Android apps via emulation this is not available yet. The upshot is there’s a real shortage of apps right now, but I would expect this to change in the next 6 to 12 months. The Playbook does come with a broad selection of apps that cover most of the core touchscreen requirements, this includes newsreaders, PDF, Word and Excel editors that work well. The lack of apps means there is not the diversity of choice and some of the useful paid for apps like Logmein are not yet available. That will probably be a show stopper for some.

So can you ditch your Blackberry in favour of the Playbook? Unfortunately not. RIM simply haven’t had time to port their core Blackberry functionality into the new QNX OS. That may still be two years away. Essentially you still need a Blackberry to receive and send your Blackberry connected services such as email, browse the internet while on the move and the all important Blackberry Messenger. What you do have in the meantime is a virtual bluetooth connection from your Playbook to your Blackberry. This is extremely easy to setup and works very well. You can keep your Blackberry in your bag and read, reply, send and even browse your Enterprise intranet from your Playbook (if your company is Blackberry enterprise enabled.) This last especially is a big win and offers huge potential for business users. Demonstrating this alone to senior execs gets them slack jawed and dizzy at the prospect of not having to squint at the BB screen for Reuters and real time internal corporate data. This virtual connection to the Blackberry works well although sometimes it did stop updating and a list of unread emails were not displayed on the…

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