BlackBerry Playbook Review

RIM advertised its tablet as the first professional-grade tablet in the tablet and as a follow up to the ‘Work Smarter, Play Harder’ slogan, it comes pre-installed with the NFS Undercover racing game as well as a multitude of office productivity tools.  The BlackBerry Playbook uses the 1GHz Cortex A9 dual-core processor on a TI OMAP 4430 chipset, while the 1GB of RAM and the PowerVR SGX540 GPU allows you to run demanding 3D games. The 7” display has 16M color depth and 1024 x 600 pixels resolution. The 5Mp rear-facing snapper can record 1080p clips at 30 fps, while the 3Mp web cam produces better images than front-facing cameras found on many tablets. The BlackBerry Playbook has 5300 mAh battery, which is bigger than what’s used in other 7” tablets as well.

The BlackBerry is an intuitive tablet; you might end up preferring its slick QNK UI that involves more gestures than other tablet platforms and its price point is within reach of most early adopters.  Like Android Honeycomb tablets, it has no physical navigation buttons, however instead of using Honeycomb’s onscreen keys, BlackBerry Playbook navigation is based on swiping gestures, swipe up to go to the home screen, swipe down to open context-sensitive menu, and swipe left or right to switch to different apps.

The drawback of a BlackBerry device is obvious; it is well behind Android and iOS on terms of apps availability. Also, the Asus Eee Pad Transformer, LG Optimus Pad and Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 are all better equipped. In addition, Motorola Xoom comes with a better browser.

The tablet has the making of a solid professional tablet and the PlayBook offers a faint glimmer of how future business tablets should be. The Playbook is attractive and it is a pleasure to use, despite a few bumps in the road, it is a good choice for any business-oriented user.