BlackBerry Playbook has been sold out in the retail outlets in India within days after the price drop, according to a report from Times of India. RIM announced a temporary price cut on the BlackBerry Playbook last week that starts from Rs.13,490 in India. Both the 16GB and the 32GB variants have been completely sold out in the retail channels across India and new stocks would be available this week. The tablet is also out of stock with online retailers such as Flipkart and LetsBuy in India. The 32 GB and the 64GB variants of the BlackBerry PlayBook is available for Rs. 15,990 and Rs.24,490 respectively. The festive offer that was previously available till 31st December 2011 is now extended by a week due to tremendous response.
Hardware
A pure black slate with an industry first advanced capacitive touchscreen 4-finger multi-touch and gesture supporting display. That’s a mouthful. Gestures are activated by the outer glass bezel surrounding the 7-inch, 1024 x 600 display. The introductory tutorial basically gives you the skinny; swipe from the bottom of the glass up to the screen to pull up the alt+tab style application navigator. Swipe from the top bezel down pulls in additional functionality (if built into the specific app you are in).
Size is actually quite nice. It’s large enough to know its not a smartphone, but small enough that it still fits in the back of your blue jeans pocket. I was quite impressed because it makes it more “mobile” than say, a larger 10-inch tablet.
The Playbook has quite a bit of processing power under the hood. RIM has opted for a 1 GHz dual-core processor with 1 GB RAM to run the new powerful and sexy QNX OS. This speed combined with memory will give RIM an advantage in the gaming department over the iPad’s 512 MB RAM. Increased RAM literally translates to bigger games being ported from the desktop space to the tablet space.
HD video out via micro-hdmi, comes standard, no extra dongles need to be purchased. Here’s a list of the full specs and features for your perusal;
BlackBerry PlayBook Specifications
- 7″ LCD display, 1024 x 600 screen resolution
- High resolution, WSVGA, capacitive screen with 4-finger multi-touch and gesture support
- 1 GHz dual-core processor
- BlackBerry® Tablet OS with symmetric multiprocessing
- 1 GB RAM
- Powerful, user-friendly QNX technology: It’s what the World Wide Web runs on
- True simultaneous multitasking — apps run simultaneously and in real time
- Accelerometer, 6-axis motion sensing (gyroscope) and digital compass (magnetometer)
- GPS
- Micro USB port
- Games, media, apps and all the rich content the real Internet has to offer
- Full Adobe® Flash® 10.1 enabled
- Built-in support for HTML 5
- No-compromise rendering of text, graphics and video
- 3 MP 1080p HD forward-facing camera
- 5 MP 1080p HD rear-facing camera
- Stereo speakers and stereo microphones
- Crystal clear video; H.264, MPEG4, WMV HDMI video output
- Micro HDMI port for 1080p playback
- Music Store by 7 Digital, BlackBerry® Podcast app
- Reliable BlackBerry Tablet OS, powered by QNX technology
- Supports POSIX OS, SMP, Open GL, WebKit, Adobe Flash and Adobe Mobile AIR
- 0.9 pounds/425g
- 7.6″/194mm x 5.1″/130mm x 0.4″/10mm
It weighs 0.9 pounds, lighter than the iPad, but heavier than the Galaxy Tab.
The buttons are crap. Yes, I said it and I do hope RIM will change this for the next version. I have become used to them now after 2 weeks of use, but it was no easy feat. The power button is nestled within a bevel to the left of the audio toggles. Basically here’s how you can skip two weeks of fuddling around and become a pro right off the bat. Use your left index finger only, place it on the top of the tablet edge, slide it across to the right until you hit the audio toggles, then just to the left of the first toggle press down. It’s awkward and I have yet to find any other way.
The camera’s are OK. They work, they are pixelated, slow and grainy, but this isn’t a camera-centric device anyway. It’s often blurry and video is, well, acceptable and not terrible.
Sound is quite good. The speakers are cleverly ported on the outer front edges and give you a real stereo effect.
Battery Life
Not as impressive as I would have imagined. I usually find it completely drained after falling asleep with say, a 60 minute mp3 playing in the background to send me off to la la land. You would think it would perform much better considering it goes into standby and disables Wi-Fi only after 5 minutes. Once you wake it, you will have to manually connect to your Wi-Fi again. A nuisance which will probably be addressed in later updates. I calculated north of 6 hours on a good “light day.”
Software
Get used to that screen; you’ll see it frequently as the BlackBerry Tablet OS continues to improve. But I will say the BlackBerry Tablet OS (QNX) is the sexiest tablet OS I have seen to date. I say this from a professional standpoint, being a user interface designer myself, as well as from a consumers point of view; usability is paramount to what’s out there now. Swiping and menu bounces are all dialed in, the opacities and overlays look very clean and high-end. You know who RIM is targeted when you look at this OS. It is a first generation, so obviously there are quirks to it that I’m sure will be sorted soon. Some buttons are a pixel off and shift position when you touch, no search capabilities within the OS, apps tray shows up even when no apps are there, I have noticed small things like this but nothing too serious. Even the volume toggles require you to press them once per step up or down, you cannot just hold it to do a quick change.
I’m not a BlackBerry user so that limits me to not being able to test the full functionality of BlackBerry Bridge, but if you want to learn more read up on it. Without it you can’t send email attachments and do other BlackBerryific stuff.
App World
The app store for BlackBerry apps. Although not loaded to the nines with flashlights, fart sound apps and 20 Angry Birds knock offs, they are slowly building up a good library. Once the Android App browser is released it should open things up plenty. Check the video at the end of this review for more on that.
It would be great if you could go back to your search results after installing an app. Unfortunately you have to search again.
Performance
The thing is blazing fast, serious. Just give the bundled Need For Speed Undercover game a run and see for yourself. I did notice some jittery after “effects” when playing the bundled Tetris game while simultaneously playing the built-in Tetris music. I would blame this on software as I can’t conceive a 1GHz processor being inadequate to perform this task.
Multi-Tasking
Yes, it is a commonly advertised feature that everyone likes to shout out loud with the their thumbs hanging off their waste belts “it can multitask.” But how much multitasking is possible with the Playbook? It will vary depending on what you are doing. You can technically “run” multiple programs and have them in a suspended state for later. This kind of ruins part of the YouTube experience but not entirely. The YouTube app and MP3 Player will keep playing while you are in another app.
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