RIM's much-anticipated PlayBook tablet will go on sale next Tuesday, but the reviews are already starting to pile up. Not ranking as high on the analyst list as Walter Mossberg or David Pogue, I didn't get one to play with, but no hard feelings. I did actually play with some of the earlier versions at Lotusphere in February and again at Enterprise Connect in March, so I have taken it for a spin.
First the basics: The PlayBook features a 7-inch screen, putting it in the same size category as the Samsung Galaxy and the Cisco Cius. This is becoming the de facto "compact tablet" size, which is developing separately from the 10-inch models like the Apple iPad and the Motorola Xoom. It prices out at $500, $600, and $700 for the 16-, 32- and 64-gigabyte models respectively, and unlike the iPad which runs iOS and the others which run some version of the Android operating system, the PlayBook uses the QNX operating system that RIM acquired in 2010. In what was probably the funniest observation David Pogue quoted a RIM product manager who said: "'It runs nuclear power plants,'...without a trace of current-events irony."
The result of the QNX decision is there is almost no software for the PlayBook. I mean no email program, no address book, no calendar, and it doesn’t even support BlackBerry Messenger, RIM's very popular chat program. It does have a very nice Flash-capable browser (thank God) and RIM says that most of those other software elements will be coming out this summer. It also has a mini-HDMI connector so you can hook it up to your flat screen TV. We expect this to become a standard feature on tablets, and Nokia even supports an HDMI output on their E71 smartphone.
The other thing the PlayBook lacks is a cellular data interface, which is peculiar for a company that makes cell phones. It does support Wi-Fi (802.11 a/b/g/n) and has a really neat, secure Bluetooth interface to a BlackBerry smartphone called Bridge. So you can access email, calendar, contacts, etc. on the smartphone using the PlayBook's touchscreen. Once the connection is broken, the application icons are grayed out, and all of the smartphone’s information is erased from the tablet, maintaining BlackBerry's legendary security profile. The other nice thing is that you don't have to pay your cellular carrier a tethering charge to link through the BlackBerry smartphone.
The device does have a nice solid feel with a rubberized back, and without software, that will be important for propping doors open. The display is bright, the touch functions crisp, but you have to wonder about the roll-out strategy. The software is still glitchy (not as glitchy as it was back in February when I first saw it), and RIM has traditionally been a stickler about getting things right even if it means slipping the delivery date. But can they be serious about this being anything but a "smartphone adjunct" with virtually none of the software that we’ve come to expect on a tablet?
With the key software not coming out until summer, you have to wonder why they just didn’t sit on it for a while. Along with that summer release will be emulators to run BlackBerry and even Android applications, though we’ll have to wait and see if the emulator can really deliver the same level of performance. In the meantime, the Playbook will launch with about 3,000 applications (versus hundreds of thousands for the Apple and Android platforms), as RIM gave a PlayBook to anyone who’d write an app; sounds like "Will work for food".
Being a dedicated BlackBerry smartphone user (and not wishing to give another dime to my blood-sucking mobile operator), I would be a PlayBook prospect. We have an iPad in the house which can tide us over, but I think I'm going to wait to see what we get in under-$500 Android tablets (the Motorola Xoom is too rich for my blood) before I take the plunge on a PlayBook.
