Reviewing The Blackberry Playbook
With their business smartphones becoming less and less popular, the Blackberry Playbook comes across as a last gasp attempt to get a foothold in a similar market. Built on their very solid and industry loved QNX operating system the name Playbook belies the serious business application software that powers this device. The cool thing about the QNX operating system is that it is made specifically for Blackberry products, like the iOS for the iPad which means that it does not need to be bloated to support all kinds of hardware configurations and is optimized for a specific specification. Beacuse of this the device is lightening quick and snappy compared with some other Android based tablets.
Under the bonnet you won’t find any surprises with a Texas Instruments OMAP 1GHz dual core processor, 1 GB RAM, 16GB of storage, a gyroscope (for auto screen rotating) and an accelerometer. The screen is just 7 inches which is 3 inches smaller compared to many of the other Android-powered tablets in a similar price range and the resolution is 1024×600 while it does pack in 170 pixels per in. so reading on the device is going to be cosy.
As you would expect from a device made by Blackberry the connectivity is excellent with a mini HDMI out port and a micro USB port for data transfer between devices however there isn’t any SD card support so you are stuck with the 16 GB of storage that it comes with.
On the back there’s a 5 megapixel camera which can also take HD movies, the image-quality is incredibly good, like the Galaxy Tab. On the front you will find a 3 megapixel camera which could be overkill for video conferencing but we are making a guess most companies are not going to be too limited by slow net speeds.
To be honest, Blackberry hasn’t done itself a favor with the Playbook, they have made a device that is the perfect size for media consumption but focused it at the business users with the rather high price. The eco-system that’s available for the Android and iOS operating systems just doesn’t exist for QNX and you are severely limited to only the most popular or professional of applications. This may not matter if you’re a travelling business person and require the functionality of a laptop with the power of your Blackberry but if you’re an average consumer you might find yourself looking enviously at your buddies Galaxy Tab or iPad 2. More comparisons.
Another drawback is that the 7 inch screen size means the virtual keyboard takes up plenty of screen space and many common punctuation marks are hidden away in a secondary menu. This makes it quite hard to prepare anything other than short notes and e-mails which is surprising, and considering Blackberry’s business market you’d have thought they might have given a bigger screen to extend productivity on the device.
At 7 inches, the Blackberry is in a different market to the Galaxy Tab and iPad 2. You have got the Kindle Fire and the Nook Tablet, each of which are nearly 1/2 of the price with the same processor and memory. These devices also have a superb media library which you can get access to.
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Gita takes high resolution photos on the BlackBerry PlayBook
