By: Nick Bilton
After its long-awaited arrival, Research In Motion’s BlackBerry tablet is finally making its debut to the world. (You can find a wide selection of reviews and commentary here.) This slick new tablet, which is officially called the PlayBook, sports a seven-inch touch-screen, weighs 0.9 pounds and costs between $500 and $700, depending on memory capacity.
As the reviews have started to roll in, most technology critics seem to like the hardware of the new PlayBook, but are unimpressed with the software and apps on the new tablet. Whether consumers feel the same is yet to be decided, but R.I.M. is going to have some tough competition from the Apple iPad, which is currently estimated to own 87 percent of the embryonic tablet market.
Below are highlights from PlayBook reviews which hit the Internet on Thursday.
The Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg has a number of hesitations about the new tablet, saying it feels rushed to market:
This first edition of the PlayBook has no built-in cellular data connection and lacks such basic built-in apps as an e-mail program, a contacts program, a calendar, a memo pad and even R.I.M.’s popular BlackBerry Messenger chat system.
To get these features with your $500 PlayBook, you must use it with a nearby BlackBerry phone connected to it wirelessly over a short-range Bluetooth connection.
I got the strong impression R.I.M. is scrambling to get the product to market, and that it will be adding other features already offered on competing devices for months, through software patches.
Tim Stevens of Engadget is impressed by the design and hardware of the PlayBook, but says the software is lacking in a number of areas:
Writing this review has been a lot like trying to hit a moving target thanks to a series of software updates that have been dropping every few days. The PlayBook of today is considerably better than the PlayBook of yesterday, which also was a big step forward from the one we were reviewing two days before that. This is both encouraging and worrying — encouraging that R.I.M. is actively working to improve things, but worrying that things as critical as memory management are still being tweaked at the eleventh hour.
Right now, the BlackBerry PlayBook is a tablet that will come close to satisfying those users who gravitate toward the first word in its name: BlackBerry. Those who were more excited about the “play” part would be well advised to look elsewhere, at least until Android compatibility joins the party. Then, well, anything could happen.
Tony Bradley of PCWorld cites a number of PlayBook pros and cons, but ultimately sees the PlayBook as a business device:
The BlackBerry PlayBook has a meager 3,000 apps which will be unveiled next week when the tablet officially launches, and it is not capable of running apps developed for BlackBerry smartphones.
Other tablets have video, or even H.D.M.I. out ports that let the tablet be connected to a projector or monitor to deliver a presentation. The PlayBook, however, lets the presenter split screen– showing the actual slides on the main display for the audience, while letting the presenter see the slide notes and other details on the tablet.
Shortcomings aside, though, the tablet has a number of qualities that make it uniquely suited for business use.
The New York Times’ David Pogue, loves some of the PlayBook features, but warns that its lack of apps could hurt consumer adoption:
The PlayBook does two impressive things that its rivals — the iPad and the Android tablets — can only dream about.
The first cool feature has to do with loading the tablet with your music, photos and music. Unfortunately, there’s no iTunes-like software to do this automatically. You have to drag files manually from your computer into the PlayBook’s folders (Music, Photos and so on). But once you’ve set up this process using a USB cable, you can do it thereafter over Wi-Fi — wirelessly.
Second, there’s a wild, wireless Bluetooth connection feature called BlackBerry Bridge. In this setup, the PlayBook acts as a giant viewing window onto the contents of a BlackBerry phone.
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