BlackBerry PlayBook Review

BlackBerry PlayBook (16GB)

The two words “play” and “book” are a bit of an odd choice for RIM’s latest attempt at consumer relevance, a tablet that, at its core, runs one of the most hardcore and industry-friendly operating systems known to man. The OS is QNX and the hardware is, of course, the BlackBerry PlayBook. It’s an enterprise friendly offering that’s also out to conquer the consumer tablet ecosphere, hoping to follow in the footsteps of the BlackBerry handsets that have filled the pockets of corporate executives and BBM addicts around the globe.

BlackBerry PlayBook Hardware

BlackBerry PlayBook, with its angular edges and dark styling, looks decidedly nondescript, more likely to open up a wormhole somewhere in orbit around Jupiter than leap into someone’s hands at retail. The chrome logo ’round the back adds some flare, with the word “BlackBerry” subtly embossed below the display on the front. The chassis is cool metal, ever so slightly rubberized, the edges squared off, and there is absolutely no flex or give anywhere. It feels perfectly solid and doesn’t yield to any attempted contortions, despite being just 0.4-inches thick less than a tenth thicker than an iPad 2. At 0.9 pounds, it’s considerably lighter.
Five megapixel camera peeks out the back, while a three megapixel unit handles front facing duties. That one is tucked under the glass and situated just above the 7 inch, 1,024 x 600 display that will threaten neither rods nor cones when on maximum brightness.

BlackBerry PlayBook Connectivity

Black PlayBook have various flavors of 4G coming down the pipe for the PlayBook later this year, including a WiMAX sampler for Sprint as well as HSPA+ and LTE. That leaves us with 802.11a/b/g/n connectivity, plus Bluetooth of course. Using that last standard you can pair up a keyboard and mouse; do so and a microscopic cursor appears on the screen. Left clicks for taps and right-clicks for gestures, initiated at the edge of the screen rather than off of it.
The device doesn’t support simple USB mass storage. You can’t just plug it in to your laptop and dump a bunch of files on it or mount it as a drive over USB. Bbut then you have only access to a small, read-only volume that contains a single driver.

Battery life On PlayBook

With standard day-to-day usage, WiFi on, screen reasonably bright, checking out some websites and playing some tunes, the PlayBook has plenty of juice to get you through a couple days without breaking a sweat. It’ll handily survive your all-day presentation at the office, make you look cool in front of your boss, then still have plenty of battery life left to chill out to some N.W.A. on the flight home.
But when is compared with the competition, it delivers a solid mid-pack performance. We looped a standard MPEG4 video clip with WiFi enabled and screen brightness at about 65 percent, managing seven hours and one minute before everything went dark. That’s about an hour more than the Samsung Galaxy Tab, but over an hour less than the Motorola Xoom.

BlackBerry PlayBook Operating system

The OS is like a web OS? If so, you’re going to love what’s hiding under the PlayBook’s (healthy) bezels capacitive digitizers that recognize a variety of gestures. System gestures originate to the side of the pixels and terminate on the screen except for the swipe to turn the screen on, which has you dragging from one bezel all the way across to the opposite one.

PlayBook ‘s Camera

The PlayBook has 3 megapixels up front and five around the back, enabling 1080p MPEG4 video recording in a tablet and, we must say, doing a fair job of it. You’re going to want a lot of light but, if things aren’t too dim, video quality is quite good, as you can see in the sample clip above.
Images quality is quite good, need a lot of light to keep the grain monster at bay, and the lack of a flash doesn’t help in that department, but get the lighting right and the results are decent. Focus is sharp and images look bright. This is definitely a tablet that you could use to take some attractive photographs, if you can get over the social repercussions of waving this 7 inch viewfinder around on vacation.

via[tabletolic]