Yesterday, we were given a short hands-on preview of the PlayBook – a BlackBerry 7in tablet which has been generating a lot of buzz. Here's our first impressions.
Words: Nic Healey, PC&T Authority)
RIM are marketing the PlayBook as “professional grade” rather than pushing it specifically at businesses like early Blackberries in the hope of also attracting regular consumers. Here you can see it compared to the Samsung Galaxy Tab.
Blackbery Playbook vs. Acer Iconia A500.
We played with one of the WiFi-only models and were cautiously impressed. Design is muted and understated, but with the feel of a quality build.
Interestingly, RIM have made the bezel of the PlayBook touch sensitive as well as the screen – you pull up the virtual keyboard by flicking the lower left corner diagonally and the battery life and connectivity indicators can be accessed by the same motion in the upper right corner, just to give two examples.
The Blackberry Playbook comes with a 3-meagpixel front-facing camera and a 5-megapixel rear-facing camera.
The Blackberry Playbook's rear facing camera in action.
The dual core 1GHz processor (now the default standard for next-gen tablets) and 1GB of memory makes for a remarkably zippy device and the screen is bright and extremely touch responsive.
We were also impressed by the news of the Android virtual machine, an app that will allow PlayBook users to run Android applications that have been ported to the BlackBerry AppWorld. We’d need to see this in action before we wax too lyrical, but it certainly opens up the usage considerably.
In all, we were fairly impressed with the PlayBook. We have some concerns regarding the amount of native BlackBerry touch applications that will be maximised for use on the 7in form factor at launch, but hope to be surprised by this.
Yesterday, we were given a short hands-on preview of the PlayBook – a BlackBerry 7in tablet which has been generating a lot of buzz. Here's our first impressions.