6 thoughts on “BlackBerry PlayBook review”

  1. Phillip,

    I haven’t seen the Playbook yet but I was hoping it would also be a phone so I could get work to replace my Blackberry with it but I guess I will wait for Rev 2.

    I have an iPad for personal use that I now tend to bring along instead of a laptop. I can VPN into work for my email and the small scale file transfers I need to do and other than that it’s surfing and checking emails which my iPad does a great job with.

    I too have noticed that some hotels are problematic with connections to the ipad. I thought it might be lack of Flash. Still amazes me that the higher price I pay for a room the more internet access costs. $49/day = free access $120/day = $12/day on my last trip.

  4. I left the Playbook that we got from RIM for free (by submitting an app prior to the release — a very broken calculator app, that is) at the office this weekend, but a few notes:

    It came with a Gmail button on the home screen — which simply opened up the browser with the tablet version of Gmail for me. (The same version, roughly, that can be seen from an iPad.) Your comments around the delete and send buttons being non-functional require a bit of tweaking: they actually do work, if you do a rapid double click, which leads me to believe that there is a bug with the onClick functionality in the browser. It is very possible that this is a Google problem, and not a RIM problem.

    My understanding of the video chat is that it is only Playbook-to-Playbook. I’m a bit surprised RIM didn’t work with Skype to develop a native app (much like they did with Facebook, which is a surprisingly “ok” app.)

    I have to disagree with your review of the speakers — I’m wondering if it was the content that was just poorly encoded. The MP3 we loaded up sounded comparable to, say, a MacBook Pro (or any other laptop with dual speakers). It certainly is louder than my iPad, which I appreciate.

    I concur that it is absolutely too small to be of any use on a day-to-day basis. The power/sleep button is also in quite the awkward position. (Although my old Curve had the sleep button on the top center, I was able to grasp it and click with one hand.)

    I tend to put blame on hotel wifi login procedures to the crazy systems that are employed — they do some weird things to authenticate/charge you. I’ve run into hotels (most recently at the University Place hotel at CMU), where even my laptop wouldn’t connect without a 15 minute call with support (so that they could provide me with a static IP that I then had to manually enter in). I would be anxious about putting blame on the Blackberry OS for that.

    It might be too light for a doorstop — but it makes for a great digital photo frame.

  5. I have exactly the same problems with web browsing (not registering clicks or submitting the proper info into forms) on my Blackberry Curve… so my guess is it is the web browser on the device.

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