The BlackBerry PlayBook Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi on April 13, 2011 9:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Tablets
- Smartphones
- RIM
- BlackBerry
- PlayBook
- Mobile
Keyboard
The PlayBook's virtual keyboard is pretty standard fare. By default you have a QWERTY keyboard with all of the alphabet present, although RIM gives you the option of switching to QWERTZ and AZERTY layouts. You can tap and hold on vowels to bring up accented letters.
Numbers and symbols are available through a modifier key:
The number and symbol layout is a bit odd compared to iOS and Honeycomb but other than that I don't really have any complaints about the layout of the virtual keyboard.
While it's possible to type on the PlayBook, it's not quite as easy as on a larger tablet for obvious reasons. And thanks to the combination of overall size and gesture bezel, I found myself hitting the bottom bezel instead of space quite frequently.
One thing you can do on the PlayBook that isn't too comfortable/possible on larger tablets is two-thumb-type in portrait mode like you would on a smartphone.
RIM doesn't support any real time autocorrection. I complained about Apple dialing back autocorrection in iOS for the iPad, I gave Google props for letting you customize autocorrection aggressiveness in Honeycomb, but RIM seems to avoid the issue entirely by just not doing it. I understand the reasoning behind dialing it back - the sort of typing you do on a tablet is a bit different than on a smartphone, but I still believe that with a dictionary that is well customized to your vocabulary autocorrect can be a boon to typing speed on virtual tablet keyboards.
Although there's no autocorrect, system-wide spell check is supported by the PlayBook OS. Misspell a word and you'll get a familiar red underline. As long as you're running a non-BlackBerry Bridge app, tapping on the word will pop up a list of possible replacements. There's no way to control the dictionary and I haven't found a way to make it learn words either. Whereas Apple and Google really focused on the virtual keyboard experience, it feels like it's a work in progress for RIM.
I managed to get a Bluetooth keyboard working with the PlayBook, so if you need to do a lot of typing there's always the physical keyboard option. RIM doesn't specifically offer a Bluetooth keyboard however anything that supports the standard should work.
With a Bluetooth keyboard you can type without having the virtual keyboard on-screen but you still need to use the touch screen to interact with apps and switch between them.
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legoman666 - Wednesday, April 13, 2011 - link
No email client? Really? Is that a joke?Ethaniel - Wednesday, April 13, 2011 - link
For now it seems, but that's clearly a sample unit. All I keep reading is "needs tuning" and "needs optimization", ergo, it's not ready, and they're going to launch it anyway. Those updates will have to be lightning-fast. I don't want to pay 500 dollars to be a beta tester...SimKill - Wednesday, April 13, 2011 - link
I'm actually surprised. This is because my cousin in India said that his friend in Dubai already bought it and has it for quite some time. Do you think there might be a reason why they are purposely delaying the American release?melgross - Thursday, April 14, 2011 - link
Probably, someone is lying about it, or they've gotten some illegally obtainedRe
Reduction model much as what happened the Apple's iPhone 4.
It's first being released in N. america, according to RIM.
vol7ron - Friday, April 15, 2011 - link
Why does everyone want to price around Apple? The more I look at these devices, the more I'm likely to get the color-nook and put Droid on it. Surely the hardware would be lacking, but the functionality would still be ballpark.16GB for $500 is ridiculous. These base models need to be in the $250-300 range.
michael2k - Friday, April 15, 2011 - link
Um, the raw materials for the iPad is about $260, meaning you can't expect to buy a 16gb tablet from any manufacturer, especially one with less buying power than Apple, for much less than $400 or so.From the iPad 2:
Display is $127
Flash is about $66 for 32gb, $35 for 16gb
Case & Battery is about $60
Mobo+Camera is about $60
So for any 10" tablet the cost if they gave it away for free would be $282 or so. Your nook "cheaps out" by having a 7" screen, only 8gb storage, a slower CPU, no cameras, and a much smaller battery. It only gets 8 hours with wifi off, the iPad 2 gets 11 hours with wifi on!
In other words you're only paying $180 worth of HW in the Nook, while the iPad gets you two 1GHz cores vs a 800MHz core, 11h of battery vs less than 8 hours, 10" and 1024x768 vs 7"@1024x600, 16gb vs 8gb, and of course, no guarantee of OS updates. You're complaint is ridiculous, actually, since almost no other manufacturer has been able to beat Apple on price yet except the Acer Iconia.
quiksilvr - Friday, April 15, 2011 - link
As much as I despise Apple, I have to agree to an extent. Yes that price is quite hefty, but if Apple didn't have it's cult following, it would have easily been on sale for $399. But thanks to idiot consumers, they can bump it up a Benjamin.michael2k - Friday, April 15, 2011 - link
And no one else can order in vast enough quantities to hit the $399 price.mcnabney - Friday, April 15, 2011 - link
I am starting to doubt the iSupply numbers you quoted.They price the very nice 9.7" IPS screen that Apple uses at $129 while the clearly inferior non-IPS screen the XOOM uses at $140. Their memory prices are also highly suspect, clinging to $2/GB for what are still really small drives compared where higher performing SSDs already are. I would guess that NAND prices for tablets are under $1/GB wholesale and in quantity.
michael2k - Friday, April 15, 2011 - link
Apple orders literally 2m 9.7" IPS screens a month, probably 40m this year alone. That gives them bulk purchasing power no one else has except the manufacturer of said screens.Motorola has to pay market prices, while Apple can literally buy an entire factory's output. http://www.isuppli.com/Display-Materials-and-Syste...
It doesn't help that the Japanese earthquake halted LCD production at major plants, either!
As for SSD chips, Apple is paying a premium to get density. The low end iPad has only a single SSD 16GB chip. The mid range iPad has one or two, and the high end has two 32GB chips. As soon as prices are good or capacity is good, I'm sure Apple will use a single 32gb chip on the low end, two 32gb chips for the middle, and 2 64gb chips on the high end.