The Blackberry Playbook was initially thought to have been named the
BlackPad. However, Research in Motions choose of the words, play and
book are rather interesting. However, to a certain extent the Playbook
does live up to the slogan of, ‘work smarter, play harder.’
The Playbook is quite the opposite of being a play thing when compared
to its Apple and Google opponents. Even though the tablet does come
with some games its biggest strengths aren’t as fun. Nonetheless, this
rather small 7-inch, 3G lacking, sophisticated looking tablet doesn’t
have the specifications to make your hair stand on end.
![]()
BlackBerry Playbook: Games as standard
Hardware
The Playbook is a rather dull black and angled edges and looks
slightly like something from the future. The front has the word,
‘BlackBerry,’ embossed below the display on the front and the back
features the logo. Nothing amazing but atleast it’s there.
When it comes to dimensions and weight the Playbook is half an inch
thicker than the iPad 2 but is an entire 0.9 pounds lighter, even
though it still feels incredibly solid and firm.
The weight, or lack
of weight, of the Playbook is what gives it an extra bonus and the
dark colour makes it less obvious when being carried about.
At the top of the tablet is located four buttons, volume up, volume
down, play/pause and an extremely small power button that is
unfortunately flush with the chassis. This means that it is almost
impossible to find by fell and even when located is only big enough to
be activated with your fingernail and still then an incredible amount
of pressure is necessary to activate the Playbook. This in itself is
something of a nuisance.
This is as bad as it gets when it comes to the hardware of the
Playbook. On the other hand the Playbook features a back facing
5-megapixel camera, a front facing 3-megapixel camera, a 7-inch,
1,024x600 display that delivers great clarity and excellent viewing
angles. At the bottom of the device nicely hidden away are three
ports: a HDMI, micro-USB and a three-prong charging connector.
![]()
BlackBerry Playbook: Professional
Processing Power
Underneath the rather small Playbook is a dual-core, 1GHz TI OMAP,
this is still 0.2GHz slower than the iPad 2, but the 1GHz is nicely
managed by the QNX OS. The OS system is backed by 1GB of RAM and 16,
32 or 64GB of storage.
The graphics is handled by a PowerVR design, allowing the Playbook to
display 1080p video over HDMI whilst still smoothly running other
apps.
Connectivity
The Playbook features 802.11a/b/g/n connectivity, plus Bluetooth as
standard. A rather interesting feature of the Playbook is that you can
connect, via Bluetooth, a mouse and a keyboard and upon doing so a
rather small cursor appears on the screen. This turns rather intuitive
gestures into boring and clumsy mouse clicks.
Battery Life
Battery life is often what can kill any upcoming piece of gadgetry.
Day-to-day usage seems to give you an average battery life of around 7
hours. Nonetheless, this is still 3 hours short of the iPad 2 and 2
hours short of Apple’s first tablet, the iPad.
Software
The operating system makes this tablet a rather fun little gadget. To
switch from one app to the next you simply swipe inward from the left
or right. This pops up the app out of full-screen and lets you move
forward or back in the queue of apps. A tap on the screen will
maximize whichever app you’re currently hovering over and a swipe up
from the bottom gives you an even higher-level view of your running
apps, which you can then zip through.
If you swipe down from the top of the app a context menu and extra
controls, that let you save files in Word to Go, appears. Finally if
you swipe in from either top corner of the screen you get a system
context menu that displays the date and time, simple media controls,
battery and connectivity indicators and a little gear you can tap to
tweak your system settings.
This may all sound rather confusing but honestly its not that
difficult once you get your hands on a Playbook.
![]()
BlackBerry Playbook: Tweakable
Browser
Research in Motion has provided the Webkit browser for you to browse
the internet and it’s not actually that bad. The pages load quickly
and are naturally adapted to fit full desktop mode, with the all to
common pinch-to-zoom ability this web browser doesn’t fail to stand up
to competition.
A huge benefit that the Playbook has over one of its biggest
competitors the iPad 2 is that it features Flash 10.1.
Music
Even though the Playbook may include Flash it’s music player is not as
intuitive and appealing as the iPod app on the iPad. The music app,
once opened, features four big buttons, back, pause/play, stop and
forward. Albums are simply displayed in a rather unstructured grid and
play upon being tapped.
![]()
BlackBerry Playbook: Music
Documents to Go
This ability to view and work on Word, Sheet and Slideshow to Go from
DataVis certainly gives the Playbook the more executive edge over its
opponents. Viewing and editing your documents may certainly be easy
but trying to enter Excel spread sheets is a slight hassle to say the
least.
Conclusion
The Playbook Tablet is a tablet that is probably the closest to
knocking the iPad 2 off it’s perch. Nonetheless, it is only slightly
better in terms of its ability to be the companion of an executive
whereas the iPad 2 has the ability to please more than just one crowd.
If you’re looking at the Playbook as some type of gaming gadget then
we would advise you to look somewhere else. In all honesty it should
have been named the WorkBook.