During flight time, I did give it a go watching TED talks and other podcasts. I was using my Android ear buds, and unfortunately they were not powerful enough to overcome the background noise of the airplane and make speech intelligible, even with the Playbook and the app at full blast. I also had brought along a pair of Blackberry ear buds I had gotten for free at 360|Flex. These proved to be powerful enough to make the speech intelligible, but were exceptionally annoying because they kept popping out of my ears, despite the three different sizes of ear buds I tried. So, I was able to listen, but not contentedly. I'm sure the Android headset would have been adequate for music, but not for speech.
Once I was relaxing on the veranda, the Playbook was great. I listened to and viewed more podcasts without any problem and in good comfort. Even the partial sun didn't mar the screen's brightness.
I also used the Playbook as a tool for running a trivia night in Mexico, and it worked quite well for that. I was viewing a Word doc, so nothing too complex. I had planned to be playing music and running a timer simultaneously, but that proved to be overkill ... for the trivia, not the Playbook. When I tested that trio of functionality before the trip, it worked great with the exception of the timer not rotating to portrait mode and that making switching apps wonky.
I also played games on the Playbook, namely BubbleMech Lite from Coldwired Games. It was a great experience. Not that the game is hardware intensive, but as a general experience, it was good. The game is good too. I'm waiting for the full version of this to come out.
So, overall, I was pleased. I still turned to books for the majority of my flight time entertainment, but I certainly intend to take the Playbook on future trips. High portability and a good battery life are also good aspects. Now if only they could get freaking TweetDeck on there...
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