Blackberry Playbook in my hands

    Hello, Habr!
    It's no secret that at the end of March the action Research In Motion Ltd. ended each member of which could receive a Blackberry Playbook tablet computer for free. Most recently, I received this device, and now, I gathered my courage to tell the habro-community about it. Read on my blog or welcome to cat.





    This is my first review of devices in my life. And since by coincidence, I was a user of the Apple iPad for some time, then I intuitively compare the Playbook with it.

    The coveted letter ...



    Blackberry Playbook pleasantly surprised me. Pleased with the device is not its free :-)

    Feel


    As you know, the device runs on a real-time operating system built on the basis of QNX. When I first found out about this, I thought it was some kind of PR ploy. But in reality, QNX (more precisely, Blackberry Tablet OS) provides excellent application performance on a dual-core 1GHz processor: the responsiveness of the interface is very good, and the animation is smooth and without the slightest lag. But the main thing is multitasking.



    It is pleasantly surprising when, against the background, by launching one application, you can turn on music, simultaneously start the application for recording video and at the same time play Need For Speed ​​Undercover, optimized specifically for the Playbook. Moreover, on the "tape" running applications, you can see in real time what is happening in all of them immediately without any brakes. True, if the application does not have enough memory in a tight 1 GB, then it closes without warning about its intentions.

    The front panel of the device does not contain buttons. Switching to the “desktop”, showing the keyboard, closing and maximizing the application to the full screen is done with gestures, taps on the sensitive frame!

    In order not to take up too much space on the small screen of the Playbook, all the application toolbars are hidden and shown using swipe from top to bottom in the frame.

    The front side of the device is equipped with a 3 megapixel camera and an ambient light sensor, thanks to which, in the dark, the high-contrast screen shines less brightly, so you do not need to make unnecessary movements to adjust the brightness to the environment.

    In addition, the device is equipped with a 5 MP camera on the back side. Both cameras support 1080p HD video recording.

    With a screen size of 1.5 times smaller than that of the Apple iPad, the matrix has a resolution of 1024x600 pixels. Fonts look smooth and attractive.

    The device has a significant weight (about 400 grams), but if you hold it for a long time, your hands are not particularly tired, because due to the small size (the larger side is 19 cm) it is convenient to hold it with two hands, and all the controls in the applications are easily accessible by the fingers. Those. the device does not need to be intercepted with one hand to reach any distant button, if it cannot be put on the table.

    The reverse side of the device is covered with a pleasant to the touch rubberized dense coating, so popping out of his hands is not so easy.

    To wake the device from sleep, you need to make a gesture on the touch frame, which instantly turns it on.

    Look


    Honestly, from that moment, positive emotions fade.

    Standard controls resemble the good old gnome, which is somewhat unexpected. But the icons send back to the distant past unreadable abstractions that are not amenable to any semiotics .

    For work


    And here another story begins. I'll start with the browser.



    The web browser on the Blackberry Playbook scored 258 points + 9 bonus points according to the test on html5test.com , which roughly corresponds to the Opera 11 browser. There is support for SVG, MathML, Canvas (20/20). Video (21/31) does not support subtitles, as well as Ogg and WebM. There is no support for WebGL.

    Due to the good performance of the device as a whole, even pages with a large number of elements are flipped smoothly, zoom is carried out by the usual gesture with two fingers.



    Switching between browser tabs is done by calling an additional menu using swipe from top to bottom on the touch frame. What I did not like was that when you open the link in a new tab, there is no visual notification about the appearance of a new tab. It seems that the link you are trying to click does not open.



    And also, the chrome of the browser (its header with the address) can be hidden so that only the line with the progress bar, page title and small back button remains at the top.

    Search in the browser is carried out through the address bar, there are a choice of search engines Google, Bing, Yahoo, AOL. There is a default font setting and other familiar options for desktop browsers.

    Playing videos from youtube, facebook, vimeo and vk is not a nuisance. In general, flash in the browser (supported by Adobe Flash 10.1) works at 4/5. Many flash games can be played directly from the browser, but there are minor lags.

    ImpactJS canvas games could not be launched. Moreover, for debugging web pages you need to connect to the device as a separate debugger. There is no developer mode in the browser.

    It is also important to note that the standard set of applications includes applications "... to go": Word, Sheet, PowerPoint.

    Word allows you to read and edit .doc, .docx, .rtf files directly from the device.



    Sheet is similar, but for Excel files. It should be noted that Sheet is not convenient for input due to the lack of a directory of functions; you cannot tap to specify the cell that should be substituted into the formula. In general, the Excel level is '97.



    "PowerPoint to go" is a useful application that allows you to arrange presentations directly from the device. You can connect a monitor, TV or projector to the device via HDMI (you will need an HDMI-> VGA adapter, which is not included) and switch slides by flipping them with your finger.



    Content is downloaded to the device like a regular USB flash drive, but for this you need to install a special Blackberry Device Manager driver, the distribution of which is available directly from the device when it is connected to the USB connector. Unfortunately, the driver is available only for Mac OS and Windows.

    Blackberry smartphone owners can use them with a Playbook. An application for the Playbook, Blackberry Bridge allows you to distribute Wi-Fi Internet to smartphones via Bluetooth, work with a list of contacts and transfer content between devices.

    App World Apps


    There are really few apps in the App World for the Playbook.
    In general, the number of applications is growing. Dozens of new applications appear per day. The share of free applications is noticeably lower than paid. The quality of the content is at the level of the Android Market. The audience pays.
    Few beautiful free apps. At first glance, if the application has a beautiful interface, then it costs from $ 4.



    Basically, “business” applications are Internet banks, trading applications, applications for organizing tasks.

    In the category of "games" applications are most, but I have not considered paid applications. Among innumerable tetris and tic-tac-toe there are few interesting and new games. Loved the port of the famous physical puzzle Doodle Blast. If you go through all the genres, then there is still enough space in the App World'e and for porting the famous ideas of gameplay.

    Hasty conclusion


    According to this review from Distimo , dated April 27, 2011, the growth dynamics of the Blackberry-applications market is quite steep.

    The development of events is especially interesting now, because the threshold for entering the development for the Blackberry Playbook is low, despite the seemingly closed platform. Applications can be written in Java, Adobe AIR, HTML5, and porting simple flash games consists only in recompilation from the Blackberry Playbook AIR SDK, and you don’t have to think about performance especially.

    I assume that at the moment, this platform is attractive for companies that are just about to enter the mobile development market ( in the US, Blackberry is 16% of the mobile device market) and is a good platform for experiments. If you need to quickly get downloads and user ratings, in my opinion this is the right place.

    However, do not forget that, first of all, Research In Motion Ltd. position their device as a “tablet computer for business tasks."

    Where to go?


    The official promo page (sexier pictures)
    Ordering a Playbook, if you are in Europe
    The first news on Habré about the appearance of a device in Russia
    Maxim Pavlov from Flexis tells how to create an application for Blackberry using Adobe AIR 2.6

    Competition for web developers


    May 15, 2011 Research In Motion Ltd. announced a new promotion with valuable prizes ! Here they already wrote about this in more detail.

    UPD: A minute ago it became known from RIM support service about the start of sales, including to Russia, on amazon.com since June 16.

    Thanks!


    I hope the topic was to my liking and was not boring.
    In the next topic about the Playbook, I would like to talk about the development for this device. Are you interested, dear Habr?

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