TabLife – RIM PlayBook Impressions (w/Video)
December 8, 2010
I was fortunate enough (thanks to Rogers) to attend the TabLife conference at Rogers Headquarters last week. I knew David Neale would be there (and I was looking forward to it having seen him in a panel discussion at NEXTmedia earlier in the week) but I didn’t know he had two PlayBooks with him.
While there was no opportunity for hands-on (RIM isn’t letting anyone touch it) we did get a lengthily video demo, here are some of my brief impressions:
- Wow – is it ever thin. Running a dual-core Cortex A9 SoC, having a pretty sizable battery, as well as far more I/O ports than what’s out there right now, one would expect this thing to be pretty thick, especially for gen 1 hardware – quite the opposite. From a distance I’d say it fell somewhere around half an inch thick. It’s also a nice size – 7″ looks quite manageable, especially when it’s in a package that’s far more elegant (and slimmer) than the Galaxy Tab.
- Application Management - While I realize this could change quite quickly and nothing presented was final, I’m not entirely sure why they would occupy as much of the screen as they have with access to application groups. They have a traditional app launcher view that shrinks down when launching programs, you’ll see from the video below that the single row appears quite large on the 7″ display (or maybe I’m just losing it?…). The single row application scrolling was grouped by category, which seemed handy, I just hope we’ll be able to create new categories when the device is finalized. (A very small gripe, I know).
- 1080p playback. Neale did a brief demo of some 1080p content playback on the device – from what I saw it was incredibly smooth, playing back even in the task manager view.
- Multi-tasking. Neale was switching between running programs with ease thank to the touch sensitive bezel, flicking up revealed running applications, switching between them was fluid – the whole process seemed very organic/natural. The task management seems to be a cross between WebOS (gestures/live view/cards) and Symbian (tile view).
- The Browser. The browser for the PlayBook is apparently ported over from the Torch. Neale demonstrated loading up the (often heavy) Rogers home page. It was at this point Neale told the audience that the browser wasn’t yet optimized for dual-core (it was only running on one) so we wouldn’t see any of the speed benefits that will be present in the final device.
Thoughts (ramblings):
At the end of the day, I came away impressed. It’s honestly a little strange to see a company like RIM (one that hasn’t really been known in recent years for being a pioneer in the industry) develop something like the PlayBook. It doesn’t feel like a RIM product, and I think that’s a good thing, especially given that many consumers are going to walk into the tablet market device agnostic; Honeycomb, Android, iOS and WebOS tablets are sure to be quite prevalent in 2011.
But the consumer market is only half the battle for RIM (maybe even less) as David Neale made quite clear during his talk that the company is focusing first and foremost on enterprise deployment. Neale made a point to talk security, since the PlayBook will make use of tethering for viewing BES accounts (Calendar, Contacts, Wireless Access, etc) on the tablet from your BlackBerry – apparently once disconnected from tethering, everything you were accessing from your BlackBerry on the tablet will disappear. This kind of security play is going to be the main differentiating factor that they’re going to draw on when they launch. The security aspects of the device, from the company that wrote the book on device security, will likely pay dividends in the enterprise sector.
The one last thing I came away thinking about: is RIM rewriting the rules of the tablet game by having this device so tightly integrated with their core offering (BlackBerry)? If this kind of functionality takes off, especially in enterprise deployment, how will the iPad compete? Currently, the iPad exists as a standalone device, a third pillar. Neale was quick to point out that they don’t want to be a third pillar, they see their tablet as something that will, hopefully one day, replace the need for many of their customers to carry a laptop at all – many have found this with their iPad’s, however, it is far from being as integrated/somewhat reliant on other iOS devices as PlayBook is with BlackBerry. I think we’re going to see a similar adoption case with PlayBook as we did with BlackBerry; starts out Enterprise and breaks through to consumer (albeit with a little more momentum this time as the PlayBook does carry the BlackBerry branding).
2011 is going to be an interesting year!
