So after having my PlayBook from BlackBerry for the last 48 hours I decided to do up a review for it.
I will start off saying that I won my PlayBook from RIM at the PlayBookTO Party and flew out to collect my prize. The party was a lot of fun with everyone taking pictures in the photo booth, getting to play with several PlayBooks scattered around the bar and drinks and food everywhere.
Upon leaving the party I was given a bag with my 32GB PlayBook inside. I went back to my friend Sam's place to crash for the night as I had to fly back home to Calgary the next day. Before going to bed I unpacked the PlayBook and plugged it in so that I could have it fully charged for my flight the next day.
I turned on the PlayBook and went through the initial setup. During the setup you need to connect to the Internet so I hooked to her WIFI and away it went downloading the OS and setting it all up. Other then the initial Demo that I didn't really want to do or pay attention to but was forced to the setup was quick and painless. Once setup I then used the BlackBerry Bridge to hook it to my Bold 9700 (I had already downloaded the Bridge application on BlackBerry before I left home knowing I would use it once I got the PlayBook). This was a little more difficult than originally thought as it wouldn't scan the Bar Code properly. I simply selected manual connection instead and it hooked up reasonably quickly.
I played around with it a little that night but was pretty tired and just went to bed knowing I would do a lot of playing with it during my 4 hour flight home the next day. When I woke up I went right to the PlayBook and signed in to my wife's KoBo account and downloaded her purchases on to the PlayBook to do some reading. While I was doing that in another window I downloaded a couple apps from App World. All went extremely fast and was quite impressed with the ability to do multiple things on the device at once.
I got to the airport early so plugged in the PlayBook and hooked up to the free WiFi (wasn't sure about battery life and didn't want to kill it before I got on the plane). I played around on Twitter and Facebook (links already on the PlayBook for both), I found it fast, responsive and easy to use. Then I played Need For Speed Undercover which comes standard on the PlayBook. The graphics, sound and playability of the game was amazing.
Once on the plane and up in the air I once again went to my PlayBook instead of turning on the TV in front of me. I browsed through the items on the PlayBook, tested some different things, read a bit of the books on the Kobo App and played Tetris and NFS. Everything was responsive and the only complaint I could think of was that I should have checked out App World a little more before I left to see what else I could have.
Once I got home I didn't really play with it much as I was tired so I just sort of relaxed but I did notice that it automatically pulled my home WiFi info off of my BlackBerry and automatically connected to it (very cool feature). On Friday I woke up and saw there was an O/S update available so I set it to download and jumped in the shower. When I came out, it was downloaded so I chose to install it and went to get dressed. By the time I was done the O/S was updated and after a reboot was ready to go. I played around quite a bit with it on Friday including going to App World and downloading several apps and games. I know people have been complaining about there not being enough apps for the PlayBook but in reality it has almost as many apps as what the iPad had when it launched a year ago. Now that it is out more apps will be developed and released for it so comparing how many apps the iPad has now to how many the PlayBook has right now is asinine. The iPad has been out for a year and a half so of course it will have more apps. Not to mention Apple is actually a software designer on top of that where as BlackBerry is not.
As for the apps that currently are on it and available I have been impressed with it. There is Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF reader all native on it thanks to Sheets To Go. There is Bing Maps, which all though not ideal as you have to connect to the web to use it, works reasonably well with the GPS on the PlayBook. The camera's both work well, the music player sounds amazing and video play is unmatched by anything I have seen out there.
The couple things that I wish they had on release and don't is a Skype type program so that you can take advantage of the dual camera's, and BBM would have been smart to either include or at least have in the Bridge App. I am sure these will come out soon but it is a deficiency for sure. The only other complaint that I could really think of is that I use a Bluetooth headset on my phone so I have to disable the Bridge to the PlayBook while that is on which means no sync for my email, calendar and contacts during that time. If they could set it up so I could hook my PlayBook directly to my BES server then I wouldn't need the Bridge and would probably be a bit nicer feature wise.
All in all I am extremely impressed with the PlayBook, I can see my self using it quite often when I don't have my laptop with me or if I just need to do something quickly and don't want to boot up my laptop. The .9lb's and overall size makes it nice and portable and with all the functionality makes it a great device. It will not be a full laptop replacement (no device really is) but will make for a great addition to my technology capabilities.
If you have a BlackBerry that is always attached to you I would recommend the PlayBook for sure, if you don't have a BlackBerry but are looking for a tablet that you can take with you and use when you don't always have your laptop with you then this is still a great device, you just need to make sure you have WiFi capabilities if you want to do anything online with it.
