Blackberry Playbook: Second Impressions

Ever move from one region of the country to the other and find familiar staples have been replaced with different, sometimes inferior versions of themselves? There are no Burgervilles, but there are Steak n' Shakes. There are no Shari's, but there are plenty of Perkins. Key Bank is gone, but Wachovia's everywhere. IHOPs are now Waffle Houses. The guy selling furniture on TV owns a lion instead of a tiger. It's not quite Bizarro-world, but things feel off. This is the feeling I get with the Playbook. Coming from an Android world, the Playbook feels adequate, but off.

I finally got a chance to sit down with my Playbook and get acquainted with it. My overall impression is that it is a solid piece of hardware, but awkward and ungainly in many places, but beautiful in others. Unfortunately, it also has some huge gaping holes.

The Good Stuff

The performance on the device is great so far. The touch screen is responsive, the OS is fast, and lag seems to be non-existent (with one exception, I'll touch on later). Video on the device is brilliant and beautiful, and the sound put out by the little speakers is listenable and strong. I can actually imagine myself using the Playbook to watch movies or podcasts while traveling.

The device itself is nice. It is smaller than I had expected, but it will be nice and portable. You can easily hold it in one hand and the backing of the tablet where your fingers will rest has a quite pleasing texture. The screen is nice and bright. The battery seems to have a very nice life to it as well.

Network connections are where I can see some lag. I can't tell if this is application specific or device specific. The browser speeds along at a respectable rate, but while watching some videos on the YouTube and National Film Board of Canada apps there were times of buffering making the media unwatchable. Other times I could watch just fine. It seems good most of the time, though.

There are some apps that are quite good. The weather app and the calculator are exceptionally good. The podcast app is also quite excellent.

Things That Make Me Go "Meh"

The cameras on the Playbook are a disappointment. There are two of them with 3MP in the front and 5MP in the back. Both take pretty disappointing pictures. Even with good light, there is a lot of speckling and noise as if I was shooting in low light. I haven't taken it out into bright daylight yet, but this is a tablet that is probably not going to be used in that setting often. For as vibrant as the video output is, it would be nice to have inputs that are even close to being worthy of being shown in the same venue. Also, pictures in the gallery view won't rotate with the orientation of the tablet. This means that pictures taken while holding the tablet in portrait mode are scrunched down to fit into landscape mode when viewed, regardless of whether you're holding the tablet in portrait or landscape mode.

The OS is a different experience in the aforementioned not-quite-Bizarro-world way. Coming from Android, I'm used to having a standard, ever present back button. On the Playbook, going back in an application or context is always a different way. Some places have an explicit back button. Some have a home button. Others lack a back button at all, requiring you to minimize the app. The same is true for submit buttons. Sometimes there will be a submit button in the app interface and other times its a button in the pop-up keyboard. That's a UI design that'll take some getting used too. Also, for a touch device, the Playbook has some really tiny interface buttons. Mainly here I'm thinking of the application close buttons. Often times I'll reenter an app while trying to close it.

More of the "different" feel of Playbook comes from the app selections. There's no Google maps, but instead, there's Bing maps. There's no Pandora, but instead there's Slacker Radio (which incidentally was a Steaming Pile of Fail when I used it). The browser also uses Bing to search, rather than Google.

Steaming Piles of Fail

There are no calendar or email apps. The Gmail app on the desktop is just a shortcut to the Gmail site. Same with the Yahoo! email app, which I couldn't get to work when I tried it. Facebook? Twitter? Both are links to the respective websites.

Manual sleep mode is broken. Supposedly you press the power button to put the device to sleep. It does not work at all for me. Plus that stinking power button is so tiny and close set to the surface that I have to use a pen to press it and be sure it registers.

One promise was that the Playbook would run Android apps. Well, not really. I thought that I could run to the Android Marketplace to fill in the gaping holes in the Playbook's app selection. I spent a good while trying to figure out how to install an Android app on the Playbook and couldn't get it. After some research, I found that the promise of running Android apps means that developers can take their Android apps, package them as Playbook apps and then put them in Blackberry App World. So this means no supplementing App World with the Android Marketplace. Which means the apps I have come to depend on are absent

I saw a recent figure saying there are just over 1,700 apps in App World, which is a surprisingly low number. This means that the field is open for developers to put out their apps. I have become dependent on certain apps on my phone that are not available for Playbook. Where is my TweetDeck? Where is Pandora? Where's Grooveshark? Where is my YouVersion Bible? (To be fair there are other Bible apps, but YouVersion rocks.) Where is my Astrid To-Do list? Where's GTalk? Skype? I guess I feel a bit guilty for beating up the Playbook because it's not Android. Still, I want these apps. Hopefully they will show up in time.

Overall, I guess I'm a bit disappointed with the Playbook. Hopefully the app selection will grow and my expectations will change. I'm not sure what I should expect from a tablet. I think I'm coming in thinking it should be like my phone, but with more options. After playing with the Playbook, mainly I expect to use this for travel entertainment and online recipes in the kitchen. I don't foresee me laying down my phone to use the Playbook unless I want to watch a movie or read an eBook. But that's all right. I got this for "free".

Recovery & Gain

I'm sick. I have a gamut of symptoms, none horribly severe, but all unpleasant. Currently I seem to be in the headache phase. For this reason, I stayed home from work, alternating doing work on the laptop with naps and moaning. It's unfortunate that I'm sick, for the obvious reasons, but also because that time overlapped with my parents' visit here for Easter. Thankfully I haven't been fully incapacitated, so I could enjoy some time with them before they left this morning.

My parents flew in on Thursday and Jen picked them up. We enjoyed showing them Smallworld, walking around Boulder, and having Easter with them. They took my car while I was at work and ran errands, did some sightseeing, and visited with friends.

Easter was pretty intense. There were a lot of folks over at Jen's parents' place and I think the prelude to my sickness was in effect making the party a bit overwhelming. At one point I had to hide down in the basement for a nap. Thankfully my pear anise pie and sweet and hot mustard were a big hit. I just wish I had gotten more of my pie.

One perk of today, or complication depending on how you look at it, was that while I was home sick, my Playbook arrived. I wasn't expecting it this soon. I had to deny my nerdly gadget lust and leave the box unopened so I would rest and work. Now that I'm done working, I'm starting it up and beginning to play.

The packaging was interesting. The interiors boxes were almost like origami. The instructions were on cards bound together with a band. Interesting. The device itself is smaller than I first imagined it, even though I'd been told it is a 7 inch screen. If I were buying this rather than getting it in trade for my app building, I would want something with a larger screen, I think. The back is this interestingly textured material that I just want to run my fingers over and caress.

One disappointing thing is that the Playbook had to do a lengthy software update before it even got going. I guess that indicates how close to the 11th hour Blackberry has been working on the OS and firmware. So far it seems nicely responsive and comfortable in the hand. Despite my feeling that it is rather small, I think that may make it a nice device for traveling. It certainly will be easier to use on a plan than this ridiculously large laptop I'm typing on right now. We'll have to see how well this works out.

Weekend Clusterfluff

Yesterday Jen and I did a lot of church stuff before she went off to visit a friend and I settled down for some reading. The day before I finished the excellent A Wise Man's Fear while we read by the creek in Boulder. It's so nice to hear running water again. After our sunny reading session we strolled the Pearl Street Mall and picked up some ice cream at Ben & Jerry's which we ate while dodging street performers and listening to buskers. I had a new flavor called (hilariously) clusterfluff. It's peanut butter and marshmallow fluff and quite intense and good. Jen had the Midnight Snack flavor which included chocolate covered potato chip clusters. It was interesting, but not my favorite.

For kicks on the way home, we went out to see if we could locate a 1,000 foot high tower I had heard about on the news and realized I could see from our house. So we wound through Erie until we found the Boulder Atmospheric Observatory. It's not quite 1,000 feet tall, but quite close. It has an elevator for raising equipment up the tower.

Jen and I have been watching an anime series together, which makes me happy. The series is Gosick. It's about a Japanese boy going to school in a fictional European country in the 1920s. He encounters a girl who is like a petulant Sherlock Holmes and they solve mysteries together. It's enjoyable because the characters are multi-faceted and it's pretty funny. And if it's a series Jen will watch with me, more the better!

Overdue

I notice that when I actually have things going on worth writing about, I'm usually too busy to write about them. There is a certain irony to that. The last few weeks have been busy, especially this last one. Then when I get around to writing, so much has transpired, I don't feel like giving it the amount of writing required. So here's what I've been up to, in brief.

I went to 360Flex this last week. It's a conference for Flex and Flash development, and easily is the best conference I've gone to for learning new things. This year it was held in Denver, so it was a different experience. For instance, at other conferences, there's a lot of hanging around with co-workers or people you've met and grabbing drinks or food after the day's sessions. But with a conference in my own town, rather than having nothing to do but hang out, as soon as the sessions are over, I can go home, and so can my co-workers. So most everyone scattered as soon as the sessions they were interested in were over. I miss that normal conference experience.

The sessions were good. I saw a guy using Flash to receive input from a brain wave scanner toy to control a quadcopter. I saw another guy using Microsoft's Kinect motion control to control a 3D picture wall. I also saw some much more practical sessions on mobile design, multitouch, type frameworks and more. Unfortunately, a lot of the sessions were interrupted by work. Even though I was not in the office, it definitely made its presence felt. I had to leave the conference early to put out a fire and other sessions were half heard as I tried to get some work done. I had even spent the Saturday before working all day, and I mean all day. If I have to do this sort of dance again, I'm not sure it is worth it. I don't get much from the conference and am stressed and irritable to boot. Still 360Flex is an awesome conference.

What else? Well, I'm reading through The Wise Man's Fear by Patrick Rothfuss. It is the second in an excellent series and it totally has its claws into me. Every bit of time I can snatch for myself I am sticking my nose in the book. It's a fantasy novel that I highly, highly recommend. The first in the series is The Name of the Wind. Start there and enjoy.

My parents will be coming up for Easter, which is awesome. I'll be glad to have them around for the holiday and share this time with them. I'm already thinking about what to cook while they're here.

We went to a Chopped themed party. Chopped is a cooking show where cooks are given a basket of ingredients and told to make an appetizer, entrée or dessert with them. Each course, one chef gets chopped from the competition. For this party, people were given an array of ingredients to choose from, with some ingredients earning you more points on account of their difficulty. Of course, I made a pie. It was a deluxe avocado pie, using graham crackers, avocado, coconut, and baker's chocolate as the four ingredients chosen from the list. I was pleasantly surprised that I won the dessert category, so now I can say I make award-winning pies. I don't need to mention that the award was a bottle of wine. It was a really fun party and a great idea. I would love to try something like this in the future.

Okay, I'd best get to the other tasks I need to get caught up on. Hopefully I will be writing again soon and not waiting half a month.