BlackBerry Playbook Tablet

The new tablet from Blackberry, the Playbook is a lot like Samsung Galaxy Tab and is priced in the same range as well. Coming right after the iPad2, Playbook has an edge over the former with superior cameras, but is pitted by the Apple tablet for its small display and lack of SIM support. So, if you want to use Playbook at a place that lacks WiFi connection, you can't use web at all, unless you have a BlackBerry smartphone to run Internet via your phone. Unfortunately, that aspect failed to impress either, because it works over Bluetooth, which already has limitations in terms of bandwidth, coverage area, etc.

Design and Appearance

Playbook is very compact with matte finish on the back side, making it easy to grip and is immune to smudges. The front panel has a 7 inch multi-touch screen with speakers on both sides and a 3 Megapixel front camera for video chatting. The backside features a 5 Megapixel camera with a protruded metallic logo of Blackberry. The tablet has a micro USB slot, HDMI slot, 3.5 mm universal jack, switch button and dedicated sound keys. Blackberry Playbook comes with a charger, USB cable, HDMI cable and a black slip case. Playbook impresses with its crystal clear multi-touch display. With a screen resolution of 1024x600 pixels, it displays crisp videos, images and web pages. The user interface is smooth with big icons and responds promptly to touch. It boasts of RIM's powerful new tablet OS and runs on 1 GHz dual core processor and 1 GB RAM, available across Playbook's 16 GB, 32 GB and 64 GB editions.

Impressive multi-tasking

Navigating apps on the Playbook is easy and the best thing about the tablet is that you can run several apps simultaneously in the background while continuing with the one on full display. This is something that has been lacking in other tablets. In the iPad or even the iPad 2 for instance, if an app is moved to the background, it stops working, though its settings are retained so that when you do bring it back, you can continue working where you had left off. In the Blackberry tablet however, a running app can be minimised by swiping upwards from the botom edge of the screen, and it will continue to work in the background.

Connectivity

Blackberry Playbook comes with WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity options. So if you're not near a WiFi hotspot, then you have to go through your Blackberry smartphone using Bluetooth for Internet and email, since there's no 3G model available, yet. We do hope that if Playbook does introduce a 3G version, it would accept regular SIM cards, unlike the iPads, which require micro-SIMs.

Email functionality a Let down

Accessing Email on the Playbook is a little wierd, and rather disappointing. For one, there's no email client on the Playbook, so you have to setup a bridge with a Blackberry smartphone for email, contacts, calendar, BBM and other related services. Moreover, connectivity between the Playbook and a Blackberry phone is done over Bluetooth, which we found to be a bit slow. Not only that, but if you loose the Bluetooth connectivity, then all email related activity stops on the tablet, and it pops up a 'lock' sign. That's wierd, because one would expect it to at least do some local caching of the data that has been synced. If you keep Bluetooth on, then it functions, but Bluetooth drains out the phone's battery really fast.

Fun with multimedia

The sound quality is impressive with intelligently placed, front facing speakers. The two cameras are a lot better than iPad's VGA cameras. All the same it can click in sports and auto mode in 16:9 aspect ratio with image stabilisation. The battery gave us a decent back-up of 5-6 hours on one charge.

Free Apps

Like Apple's App Store or Anrdoid Market, Blackberry's App World is the marketplace to buy or freely download apps for the Playbook. Many vendors are already developing lots of apps for the Playbook. One such Indian app vendor is Conde Nast India. They have two freely downloadable apps already available. One is Conde Nast Traveller--a GPS enabled travel guide that gives users essential details about the best of things to do, places to stay, eat, drink and shop in 18 different destinations. The other is Vogue Stylist, which is a highly interactive app experience that provides users with customized trends, fashion tips and great advice from Vogue India's esteemed panel of experts within 72 hours. One good thing we found about the Blackberry's App world is that registration doesn't require you to enter your credit card details, which unfortunately happens to be the case for the iPad. So if you just want to download free apps from the app store, you still have to provide your credit card details on the Apple App Store, but Blackberry has no such restriction.

Bottomline: It is good, but definitely not the best tablet around.