PlayBook Update: I Went With Plan B…
Well, I gave in. I just spent two weeks on the road — one week of family travel to attend my daughter’s college graduation and one week of business meetings in Germany. That mix of activities was the ideal test opportunity for the 64Gb BlackBerry PlayBook I’d ordered but when it still hadn’t arrived by 48 hours before my departure I called BestBuy to tell them I’d reluctantly take a 16Gb model rather than nothing at all. Luckily they had a 32Gb PlayBook so I took that instead.
I just returned from the extended trip and will assemble a more detailed review to share later. For now, here are a few quick observations:
- I liked the 7” size as it was easy to pack along everywhere, was compact enough for convenient use in all sorts of settings including both one-handed and two-handed, proved excellent at watching movies on long plane flights, and was large enough to easily see and use.
- It’s solid and well built, holding up to lots of jostling in travel bags, on planes, and being passed around by family and colleagues (including a couple of hours of vigorous use by my 7 year old niece who took a strong liking to Need for Speed).
- Battery life was good. It typically only needed a charge every second or third day. I was able to watch 6+ hours of movies on flights to/from Europe.
- Performance seemed fine. I don’t recall experiencing significant waits while apps or web pages loaded.
- Lack of 3G wireless (cellular) support was far more of a limitation than I’d expected. Being tethered to my BlackBerry Bold phone was a major inconvenience while in Europe as I don’t have an international data plan on that phone. (Long story…) I therefore didn’t use the PlayBook much in Europe for network-related tasks: email, web surfing, checking travel plans, etc. except in rare cases where it proved convenient to do so via WiFi. Even with WiFi the lack of a built-in email app significantly reduces usefulness.
- The larger display and good touch screen proved excellent for accessing the internet and the browser handled all my regular sites quite well.
- The lack of off-line mapping was painful as I’ve gotten spoiled by having free off-line mapping with turn-by-turn navigation built into every Nokia smartphone.
- There wasn’t much software in App World — few tempting games, no significant productivity or travel apps, and the tools I was eager to use (Pandora, Skype, Kindle, IM, TripIt, astronomy) aren’t available. This is a huge problem which RIM hopes to address by providing Android support at some point.
Overall I found the PlayBook to be well built, convenient, and excellent for viewing video. Where I could get access to WiFi it was nice for browsing the web. Most of the shortcomings are software related so hopefully they’ll be addressed soon. I’m keen to try out Android compatibility when it becomes available. My only major regret at this point is that there’s no built-in support for 3G wireless (cellular) connectivity and that’s a definite disappointment.
