Play with The Blackberry Playbook

RIM has announced their first tablet computer, Blackberry Playbook. BlackBerry Playbook naming beyond belief among many who had expected a tablet PC or RIM will be named Blackpad Surfbook or Surfboard. In fact, the facts say another, Playbook is the name selected and announced by RIM CEO Mike Lazaridis yesterday at their annual developer event in San Francisco's Blackberry 2010.

RIM's announcement yesterday regarding the expansion of the application ecosystem  for the BlackBerry PlayBook brought with it the big news that Android Apps (specifically Android 2.3 apps for the time being) will be supported on the BlackBerry PlayBook. This doesn't mean that RIM is working with Google to bring Android marketplace to BlackBerry, but rather that developers who have made Android apps can sign up as BlackBerry App World developers (which is now free of charge) and distribute their apps to BlackBerry PlayBook owners via App World. Developers will have to repackage, code sign and submit their Android apps to BlackBerry App World, but the process should be pretty simple for any current Android app developer should they choose to. These android apps will then run on the BlackBerry PlayBook via an "App Player" in a "sandboxed" environment on the PlayBook. This is the same process that will also allow current BlackBerry Smartphone java apps to run on the PlayBook. The Android App Player will be demoed at BlackBerry World in May, and will become available this summer to PlayBook owners - so it won't be there on the April 19th launch date.

It was certainly an odd and auspicious evening. On the eve of Apple launching their iPad 2 to the fawning masses, Research In Motion invited a group of select journalists to have a up close and personal look at a near-feature complete version of the Blackberry Playbook. Their 7″ tablet that is sure to be the subject of a great deal of comparison with Apple’s latest offering in the coming year.

Unlike other events where the PlayBook was closely guarded and we were only allowed to see guided demos we were actually allowed to handle and play with the device for extended periods of time. And this time, the PlayBook was sporting its brand new Webkit-based browser, which was previously missing from earlier versions of the PlayBook SDK.

There’s no doubt that the PlayBook is one very smart device. It’s light, very well constructed, with a solid and well-engineered feel to it. It’s extremely fast — and I’d even say it’s considerably faster than the current generation iPad and even the Motorola XOOM. And at seven inches, it fits quite nicely in a jacket pocket or a ladies’ small pocketbook — something that the iPad can’t do.

RIM may have gambled a great deal on QNX versus going with an established mobile OS with a large developer ecosystem such as Google’s Android. QNX is a thoroughbred, built for high performance and reliability, which has proven itself in the field with extremely demanding applications since 1982. Yep, you got that right — QNX has been around even longer than Linux.

In terms of raw OS performance,  iOS 4.x and Android 3 have met their match, and then some with PlayBook’s implementation of QNX.

The multitasking in the PlayBook UI is extremely impressive — it’s very easy and quick to navigate between running tasks, and you can see everything running in the background as you move between running apps. HP has made recent allegations that the PlayBook’s QNX user interface resembles their own WebOS which runs on their 10″ TouchPad device, which is due to launch sometime this summer.

The browser engineering team that RIM acquired out of the Torch Mobile purchase has done a real phenomenal job with the PlayBook’s browser. It’s fast, renders pages beautifully and responds in a fluid fashion to multi-touch gestures.

Like Apple’s own Mobile Safari browser on the iPad, the PlayBook also uses a Webkit-based system and it is compatible with modern HTML5 standards, including HTML5 video and the latest features of CSS3. Fonts resize and render very sharply, and the experience using the browser is extremely pleasurable.

In terms of actual apps, I was able to observe the performance of Adobe Air as well as native QNX C++ applications, all of which ran extremely smoothly and very fast on the device. The PlayBook uses a variant of Texas Instruments’ dual-core OMAP 4430 ARM Cortex A9 SoC running at 1Ghz, with 1GB of onboard RAM and an integrated POWERVR SGX540 GPU that can render fast 3D OpenGL graphics and decode full 1080p HD video, and I saw a few movies play on the brilliant color screen. It works as well as you could possibly expect.

And yes, it has dual HD video cameras, with 3MP on the front and 5MP the back, with an HDMI port for video output, just like its high-end Android tablet cousins.

Nobody is going to be disappointed with the performance or the overall build quality of the PlayBook, that much is without question.