Colin's Journal: A place for thoughts about politics, software, and daily life.
April 8th, 2012
Blackberry Playbook
I’ve recently acquired a blackberry playbook by porting ExpenseClam to this platform. The physical format of a 7 inch tablet seems to work very well. It is still small enough that carrying the device around is very easy, and holding it in one hand is entirely comfortable. Meanwhile the screen is just large enough that websites can be viewed in their desktop format, without having to zoom in and scroll.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that the quality of available apps is very low. Most of the big name apps are missing (e.g. no Skype). There are many ported Android apps, but these work only partially. Native Android features are missing and they have a tenancy to hang.
Native apps that I have found suffer from a clunky keyboard implementation, and flaky UI widgets. The Web browser is reasonable, but occasionally suffers from unresponsive UI elements.
My overall impression is that the tablet would be far more useful and interesting if it was running Android ice cream sandwich. This leaves me wondering whether I want to get either a 10 inch tablet our something around the 7 inch mark.
To sum up: when writing this post, I started on the tablet, but the application hung, and I ended up retyping it on my phone. It is hard to see the playbook platform being a success given it’s current state.
2 responses to “Blackberry Playbook”
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Most of the £200 ones are OS1, but the adverts are touting OS2. Which is yours?
The lack of Skype is because they want you to use the Blackberry to Blackberry version, same as the iPads.
It’s running version 2, it is an over the air update so they should all get it.