I think the applications that are available on both tablets will be a deciding factor for a lot of people. For businesses I think that the Playbook will be very well received immediately, particularly if they already use Blackberry phones.
I am extremely interested in the Playbook and will be excited to see what the iPad2 has to fight the Blackberry tablet.
On the eve of the iPad 2 launch, RIM previewed a feature-complete version of the PlayBook tablet to the press, and it looks smart and extremely powerful. But will their efforts be nearly enough?
It was certainly an odd and auspicious evening. On the eve of Apple launching their iPad 2 to the fawning masses, Research In Motion invited a group of select journalists to have a up close and personal look at a near-feature complete version of the BlackBerry PlayBook, their 7″ tablet that is sure to be the subject of a great deal of comparison with Apple’s latest offering in the coming year.
Indeed, it was a weird scene. RIM held its press event at a club lounge named “Provocateur” in downtown Chelsea in New York City, which is only a block away from Apple’s 14th street retail location and Google’s East Coast offices. It was if all the energy in the tablet world was being concentrated in one place, at one time.
The tension was so thick you could cut it with a knife.
Unlike other events where the PlayBook was closely guarded and we were only allowed to see guided demos (such as a developer preview I attended a few months earlier) we were actually allowed to handle and play with the device for extended periods of time. And this time, the PlayBook was sporting its brand new Webkit-based browser, which was previously missing from earlier versions of the PlayBook SDK.
There’s no doubt that the PlayBook is one very smart device. It’s light, very well constructed, with a solid and well-engineered feel to it. It’s extremely fast — and I’d even say it’s considerably faster than the current generation iPad and even the Motorola XOOM. And at seven inches, it fits quite nicely in a jacket pocket or a ladies’ small pocketbook — something that the iPad can’t do.
Additionally, I’d have to say I actually prefer the PlayBook UI to both iOS 4.2.x and Android Honeycomb — it has this really slick, high-performance feel about the whole thing that’s difficult for me to quantify. You really have to experience it to believe it.
Much of this I think can be attributed to QNX’s breeding as a Real-Time OS with a highly-efficient microkernel that runs extremely fast on the metal, with nearly 30 years of development behind the OS core itself.
While I think RIM may have gambled a great deal on QNX versus going with an established mobile OS with a large developer ecosystem such as Google’s Android, I certainly understand their choices. QNX is a thoroughbred, built for high performance and reliability, which has proven itself in the field with extremely demanding applications since 1982. Yep, you got that right — QNX has been around even longer than Linux.
In terms of raw OS performance, I believe iOS 4.x and Android 3 have met their match, and then some with PlayBook’s implementation of QNX.
The multitasking in the PlayBook UI is extremely impressive — it’s very easy and quick to navigate between running tasks, and you can see everything running in the background as you move between running apps. HP has made recent allegations that the PlayBook’s QNX user interface resembles their own WebOS which runs on their 10″ TouchPad device, which is due to launch sometime this summer.
I’m not sure I agree with HP that PlayBook’s UI is an “imitation”, but I can see where they might get that impression. Like WebOS, PlayBook’s UI uses a similar “card” paradigm, which allows you to change context between apps by using flipping gestures across the device’s 7″ 1024×600 capacitive touchscreen, which uses the same ultra-strong Gorilla Glass made by Corning used on the iPad.
The browser engineering team that RIM acquired out of the Torch Mobile purchase has done a real phenomenal job with the PlayBook’s browser. It’s fast, renders pages beautifully and responds in a fluid fashion to multi-touch gestures.
Like Apple’s own Mobile Safari browser on the iPad, the PlayBook also uses a Webkit-based system and it is compatible with modern HTML5 standards, including HTML5 video and the latest features of CSS3. Fonts resize and render very sharply, and the experience using the browser is extremely pleasurable.
In terms of actual apps, I was able to observe the performance of Adobe Air as well as native QNX C++ applications, all of which ran extremely smoothly and very fast on the device. The PlayBook uses a variant of Texas Instruments’ dual-core OMAP 4430 ARM Cortex A9 SoC running at 1Ghz, with 1GB of onboard RAM and an integrated POWERVR SGX540 GPU that can render fast 3D OpenGL graphics and decode full 1080p HD video, and I saw a few movies play on the brilliant color screen. It works as well as you could possibly expect.
And yes, it has dual HD video cameras, with 3MP on the front and 5MP the back, with an HDMI port for video output, just like its high-end Android tablet cousins.
Nobody is going to be disappointed with the performance or the overall build quality of the PlayBook. That much is without question.
So what’s not to like?
