As most people know by now, different devices run on different operating systems. The iOS has been around for quite some time and there are a lot of applications for it.
A major problem that most people have with the iPad is its lack of Flash support. The Playbook has a browser that supports Flash and even HTML5 and is a closer experience to browsing the internet on a computer. Connectivity with both devices is mainly achieved via their wireless adapters, which supports all currents standards. The iPad has the upper hand in this area though as there are models with 3G capabilities that can serve as an alternative when WiFi is unavailable.
It may cost a bit more but for some people, it may be the only way to go. It has become standard for most devices nowadays to have at least one camera but many have two; one at the back and another at the front.
The Playbook has a high resolution camera at the back but, most notably, has a 3 megapixel camera at the front. Aside from video calling, it can serve very well for taking pictures like vanity shots. The iPad does not have any camera of sorts so picture taking or video calling is immediately out of the picture. That much is without question. Well, for starters, RIM refused to talk pricing or availability with anyone.
That alone sets off alarms. If it costs considerably more than an iPad 2, then I think we can say that it's probably game over for this device in terms of it being able to eat up significant tablet market share.
I'll believe it when I see it. RIM told me they might have a pre-release model available for me to review within weeks. They also refused to talk about battery life in terms of finite, measurable numbers. The PlayBook sports a mAh Lithium-Ion battery, but we have to remember that this is a 7" device, not a 10" device like an iPad, so it's not as big a battery, and thus can't hold as much charge.
The battery also isn't user-serviceable or removable, so it's not like there's a chance of there being an after-market bigger battery pack for the thing. If it doesn't get at least six or seven hours of use out of a single charge, then I suspect that Apple also is going to win this round by a considerable margin.
There's another thing I noticed about this device which also concerned me. In the various demo units I got to play with, I felt that the back of each tablet was giving off a good amount of heat. Not enough to burn my hands, but enough to make my palms pretty sweaty.
To be fair, the RIM reps told me that they were charging the things constantly all day and some of them had been in use for about twelve hours straight, so this wasn't a realistic use case scenario.
And these aren't the final production devices. However, in all honesty, i've never noticed ANY kind of heat coming off the back of my iPad, and there have been times when I've used it with the protective Otterbox case off for over four hours straight when watching movies and playing 3D games with no noticeable heat coming off the back of the casing whatsoever. I'm sure the A4 on the iPad generates some sort of heat, but the aluminum casing dissipates it extremely well as to be completely unnoticeable.
I will add that the Playbook is considerably thinner than the Generation 1 iPad, and the the higher-power SoC is probably a lot closer to the casing than on Apple's device, so that might account for it. Still, if the iPad 2 turns out to clock out at similar speeds with a dual core, similar thickness and no heat issues, the RIM engineering team might want to consider putting in some more hours working on thermal management. And while the UI was fast and fluid, I did observe a number of software crashes with the units I played with, but the OS handled them well, allowing me to close errant programs without compromising the rest of the UI.
Again, these were pre-production devices, so I'm willing to be pretty forgiving until I get to see the final versions. While I came off very impressed with the device, I did very much get the feeling that the PlayBook really wasn't fully-baked, and even RIM's head of browser engineering told me that "we're not done. All this technical stuff aside, the biggest negative about the PlayBook and one which I really hope RIM reconsiders is the need to Bluetooth tether to an actual BlackBerry with a connected BIS or BES account in order to access the onboard email and calendaring application.
Unless you have web-based access via the PlayBook browser, you can't use email without owning a RIM handset as well. I urge Research in Motion to include a native QNX mail client that works with hosted email services without a tethered device. If it does, pricing could become a competitive advantage for the BlackBerry maker.
In typical Apple fashion, the company left out a number of noteworthy facts from its online iPad 2 technical specifications lists , one of the most glaring of which is the lack of any information on the iPad 2's RAM. Apple representative recently said that the device would ship with a meager MB of RAM--less than the MB found in the current iPhone 4 smartphone. If that is the case, the iPad 2 and its owners are going to experience some performance "hiccups," to say the least, regardless of just how powerful its dual-core processor proves to be.
It's more likely that the iPad 2 has at least MB, but Apple's silence on the subject is slightly worrisome. From an enterprise perspective, the amount of RAM packed into a tablet could be significant, especially if organizations plan to run resource-intensive apps or services alongside each other. Both of RIM and Apple's tablets have front facing and rear cameras.
However, Apple hasn't offered many details about the digital shooters it will ship with the iPad 2, saying only that the back camera is capable of capturing p, HD video up to 30 frames per second with audio. The iPad 2's lower-resolution front camera takes VGA video up to 30 frames per second with audio. But Apple didn't offer any solid details on still-camera megapixel counts, specifying only that the rear camera has 5X digital zoom and the front camera takes VGA quality images. So for still-image and video capture, which could be valuable to remote staffers in warehouses and businesspeople in boardrooms, the PlayBook appears to have the iPad 2 beat, at least in resolution.
Apple has a slight advantage over RIM when it comes to video conferencing, since it already has its own proprietary video-conferencing application and service, called FaceTime. But RIM must have some sort of video-conferencing offering up its sleeve, so we'll very likely see a related BlackBerry-announcement in the days or weeks following the PlayBook's release. The following speculation should be taken with a grain of salt, since it is just that: speculation. But the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet will very likely prove to be more durable than the iPad 2, due mainly to the smaller size of its display and rubber-like outer casing.
And durability will surely be an important consideration for enterprises, especially those with remote workers in less-than-forgiving industries and environments. In general, the most vulnerable part of a tablet PC is its glass display.
And the larger that glass display, the larger the likelihood that the display will be damaged. I have not yet handled the iPad 2, and as such I can't really gauge its durability. However, I have spent quite a bit of time with pre-release versions of the PlayBook tablet and it seems much more durable than the first generation iPad, which I've also had time to handle extensively.
The fact that the iPad 2's display is very similar if not exactly the same as the first iPad's screen makes me think the two models will be similarly durable.
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