Engadget's BlackBerry PlayBook Review
In the footsteps of the topic of the tablets, which are waiting for us in 2011 , I present to your attention the translation of the review of the BlackBerry PlayBook, conducted by the Engadget team.
We just happened to touch a wonderful tablet, but it did not work on Android, webOS, iOS, or Windows. It had a real-time operating system called QNX (which RIM bought in April), in conjunction with a Flash-enabled WebKit browser. The release of the tablet is expected in the first quarter of 2011. The BlackBerry PlayBook turned out to be surprisingly polished and responsive at this stage, even considering that according to RIM there is still a lot of work. In fact, the only thing that upset us after approximately 30 minutes of getting acquainted with the tablet (under the supervision of Mike Lazaridis) is that at the moment you cannot buy a BlackBerry smartphone, which would be just as pleasant to use as this tablet. Stay with us, after the break we will go through the whole product, show the video and arrange a multitasking stress test on a dual-core processor.
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The PlayBook is much smaller than it looks in the pictures, and it is no less smaller than its closest 7-inch rival, the Galaxy Tab. Matte rear wall is flat and the device looks very "serious" - a sort of "ThinkPad among tablets." In the middle is the camera and the classic BlackBerry logo - and that’s it.
At the top there are small, but easily pressed buttons (the only physical buttons on the device): volume, “play / pause” and “power on / off”. At the bottom is mini-HDMI, micro-USB and a charging connector. There are no visible controls on the front surface, but along the frame there are actually capacitive sensors that track gestures from the edge of the screen (similar to the Palm Pre). Above the screen, right in the middle is the second camera.
The screen is great. Very bright, the colors are perfect, and the viewing angle does not allow to be desired (at the level of the iPad or even better). The pixel density at 1024x600 is simply gorgeous, the same 170 dpi as the Galaxy Tab (against 132 for the iPad). Responsiveness to touches is basically excellent, but we had some problems with some small controls, although at this stage this can be attributed to software problems.
We were in a rather dark room, but the 5-megapixel rear camera produced quite good, but terribly grainy images - we hope that in the best conditions it will cope better.
The base model will be supplied only with a WiFi module, but in the summer a model with a WiMAX module will be released. You can also “pair” the tablet with your BlackBerry-smartphone via Bluetooth, if you are tightly hooked on BB Messenger and you are satisfied with only a 7-inch keyboard.
Under the hood - dual core gigahertz processor ARM Cortex A9.
The operating system is much like webOS. Some may say too similar, but we will not complain. The famous webOS-ovsky "gesture up" has been improved and extended to all 4 screen borders: a gesture from the upper border displays technical details (battery charge, wireless connection status, a shortcut to the settings); the gesture from the bottom border calls the main screen with a set of "cards" (this is our term / Palm, not RIM) in the center, with the display of technical information at the top and with access to different categories of applications at the bottom; Finally, gestures from the left / right of the screen translate the PlayBook into the scrolling mode of the “cards” in full screen.
The “cards” themselves, of course, are not the most original innovation from RIM, but they perfectly demonstrate the technical power of QNX, because they can stay “alive” while you scroll through the “cards” and even when you switch to other applications. You can watch the video with our stress test, we did not manage to reach the limit of the device, even despite simultaneous playback of 1080p video, playing in real time in Quake 3, playing the song in a music player and viewing photos in a slideshow mode (although at the end it has become a bit lag). Fortunately, you can customize multitasking to your liking: suspend the application during the transition to the "cards", suspend when switching to another application, or the "everyone dance and dance" mode when everything works at the same time.
Gesture up on the main screen opens a full-screen application browser, which currently contains mostly Adobe AIR applications. We were unable to detect the original BlackBerry applications (like BBM, Calendar, Messages), because they require a Bluetooth connection to a BlackBerry smartphone, and RIM was not ready to demonstrate this. Although maybe Mike L. just for some reason did not want us to look at his personal mail.
The music application was not bad, but we did not find any special functionality in it. Documents To Go Sheets To Go are quite decent in terms of features, but in terms of UI, they looked pretty simple — more like a web app than a real app. There is an official Adobe PDF Reader, which was quite fast, but here we will throw another stone in the garden of the UI-department. Don't get us wrong, everything was fine, we just didn’t find any innovations in the area of ​​“how it should look on a tablet”.
The best application turned out to be a browser showing a tab bar with a gesture from the top of the screen. Performance level, including smooth zoom and scrolling.
The on-screen keyboard is well designed and very responsive, and the print key sound is probably the best in all times. Unfortunately, words hints and auto-adjustments are not implemented at the moment, but we hope that RIM will port these capabilities from the main axis before launch.
If you still do not understand, we were impressed. In general, the device is damn fast, convenient in hand and intuitive to use. Our main complaint is applications. RIM makes a big bet on ported applications on Adobe AIR, but as the Android example showed, the native SDK is very important for games, and we still don’t know what RIM has in store for that matter - although we were assured that writing under QNX is very simple, and this is one of the reasons why the company managed to turn around with this project so quickly. We were also promised to keep us informed.
If RIM gives a fairly aggressive price, chooses a good “calm moment” to start (before the Xoom or maybe iPad2 comes out), and deal with minor issues, we will see a really successful product.
Photos taken from the original article. Also on the link you will find a 3.5-minute video.
We just happened to touch a wonderful tablet, but it did not work on Android, webOS, iOS, or Windows. It had a real-time operating system called QNX (which RIM bought in April), in conjunction with a Flash-enabled WebKit browser. The release of the tablet is expected in the first quarter of 2011. The BlackBerry PlayBook turned out to be surprisingly polished and responsive at this stage, even considering that according to RIM there is still a lot of work. In fact, the only thing that upset us after approximately 30 minutes of getting acquainted with the tablet (under the supervision of Mike Lazaridis) is that at the moment you cannot buy a BlackBerry smartphone, which would be just as pleasant to use as this tablet. Stay with us, after the break we will go through the whole product, show the video and arrange a multitasking stress test on a dual-core processor.
')
Iron
The PlayBook is much smaller than it looks in the pictures, and it is no less smaller than its closest 7-inch rival, the Galaxy Tab. Matte rear wall is flat and the device looks very "serious" - a sort of "ThinkPad among tablets." In the middle is the camera and the classic BlackBerry logo - and that’s it.
At the top there are small, but easily pressed buttons (the only physical buttons on the device): volume, “play / pause” and “power on / off”. At the bottom is mini-HDMI, micro-USB and a charging connector. There are no visible controls on the front surface, but along the frame there are actually capacitive sensors that track gestures from the edge of the screen (similar to the Palm Pre). Above the screen, right in the middle is the second camera.
The screen is great. Very bright, the colors are perfect, and the viewing angle does not allow to be desired (at the level of the iPad or even better). The pixel density at 1024x600 is simply gorgeous, the same 170 dpi as the Galaxy Tab (against 132 for the iPad). Responsiveness to touches is basically excellent, but we had some problems with some small controls, although at this stage this can be attributed to software problems.
We were in a rather dark room, but the 5-megapixel rear camera produced quite good, but terribly grainy images - we hope that in the best conditions it will cope better.
The base model will be supplied only with a WiFi module, but in the summer a model with a WiMAX module will be released. You can also “pair” the tablet with your BlackBerry-smartphone via Bluetooth, if you are tightly hooked on BB Messenger and you are satisfied with only a 7-inch keyboard.
Under the hood - dual core gigahertz processor ARM Cortex A9.
Soft
The operating system is much like webOS. Some may say too similar, but we will not complain. The famous webOS-ovsky "gesture up" has been improved and extended to all 4 screen borders: a gesture from the upper border displays technical details (battery charge, wireless connection status, a shortcut to the settings); the gesture from the bottom border calls the main screen with a set of "cards" (this is our term / Palm, not RIM) in the center, with the display of technical information at the top and with access to different categories of applications at the bottom; Finally, gestures from the left / right of the screen translate the PlayBook into the scrolling mode of the “cards” in full screen.
The “cards” themselves, of course, are not the most original innovation from RIM, but they perfectly demonstrate the technical power of QNX, because they can stay “alive” while you scroll through the “cards” and even when you switch to other applications. You can watch the video with our stress test, we did not manage to reach the limit of the device, even despite simultaneous playback of 1080p video, playing in real time in Quake 3, playing the song in a music player and viewing photos in a slideshow mode (although at the end it has become a bit lag). Fortunately, you can customize multitasking to your liking: suspend the application during the transition to the "cards", suspend when switching to another application, or the "everyone dance and dance" mode when everything works at the same time.
Gesture up on the main screen opens a full-screen application browser, which currently contains mostly Adobe AIR applications. We were unable to detect the original BlackBerry applications (like BBM, Calendar, Messages), because they require a Bluetooth connection to a BlackBerry smartphone, and RIM was not ready to demonstrate this. Although maybe Mike L. just for some reason did not want us to look at his personal mail.
The music application was not bad, but we did not find any special functionality in it. Documents To Go Sheets To Go are quite decent in terms of features, but in terms of UI, they looked pretty simple — more like a web app than a real app. There is an official Adobe PDF Reader, which was quite fast, but here we will throw another stone in the garden of the UI-department. Don't get us wrong, everything was fine, we just didn’t find any innovations in the area of ​​“how it should look on a tablet”.
The best application turned out to be a browser showing a tab bar with a gesture from the top of the screen. Performance level, including smooth zoom and scrolling.
The on-screen keyboard is well designed and very responsive, and the print key sound is probably the best in all times. Unfortunately, words hints and auto-adjustments are not implemented at the moment, but we hope that RIM will port these capabilities from the main axis before launch.
Conclusion
If you still do not understand, we were impressed. In general, the device is damn fast, convenient in hand and intuitive to use. Our main complaint is applications. RIM makes a big bet on ported applications on Adobe AIR, but as the Android example showed, the native SDK is very important for games, and we still don’t know what RIM has in store for that matter - although we were assured that writing under QNX is very simple, and this is one of the reasons why the company managed to turn around with this project so quickly. We were also promised to keep us informed.
If RIM gives a fairly aggressive price, chooses a good “calm moment” to start (before the Xoom or maybe iPad2 comes out), and deal with minor issues, we will see a really successful product.
Photos taken from the original article. Also on the link you will find a 3.5-minute video.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/111369/
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