The PlayBook's new e-mail app gives you a unified inbox for all of your accounts, including social networks such as LinkedIn and Twitter. In spite of the PlayBook's relatively small 7-inch screen, RIM has made it possible to juggle between inbox views and e-mails using a collapsible multipanel interface.
When it comes to e-mail composition, RIM includes a rich text editor that allows you to change fonts, create lists, bold, underline, and color--just as you'd expect from a desktop e-mail application.
The included keyboard has been improved, too, though to notice these improvements is also to remember they weren't there to begin with.
Features such as autocorrect, predictive text, and keyboard shortcuts have all been thrown in. The PlayBook's Calendar app works just as you'd expect. You can create appointments directly or subscribe to any online calendars you may already have. As shown in the above video, one interesting design trick RIM employed is to increase or minimize the calendar date depending on the number of events scheduled on it.
This way, you can glance at your calendar and immediately spot the busiest days. Its first trick is the capability to sync profile information from your connected LinkedIn and Twitter accounts. Its second trick is its integration with the Calendar app. Rescheduling an appointment on your calendar will trigger an automatic notification to the contacts you have associated with the event. Overall, the features provided by PlayBook OS 2. For RIM's loyal base of business users, the e-mail and contact integration with LinkedIn is an attractive proposition.
A few other enhancements, such as the ability to organize apps into folders, video chat with other PlayBook owners, and an application dock at the bottom of the home screen, refine an already great tablet experience. Desktop sync Syncing media to your PlayBook from your computer isn't the simple drag-and-drop experience as on an Android device, or the time-honored iTunes sync of an iPod or iOS device.
Instead, when you connect the PlayBook to a Mac or PC, a preloaded installer will pop up and run you through the BlackBerry Desktop software installation.
The setup is fairly painless, and it gives you separate tabs for manually or automatically syncing various media, such as photos, music, and videos. After the setup, your computer will maintain a wireless connection to your PlayBook over your home network, allowing you to send files to the device from the virtual drive on your computer. One use for this feature is quickly transferring a report or presentation to your PlayBook without taking it out of your bag and physically connecting it.
Included apps Out of the box, the PlayBook comes prestocked with some great apps and utilities. The PlayBook's killer app, though, is its browser.
Unlike iOS and Android browsers, which evolved from the world of mobile phones, the PlayBook's browser is a clean slate no pun intended , and Web sites react to it just like a desktop browser. This means you won't be wasting any time on mobile versions of sites designed for the small screens of smartphones--a problem that even larger tablets such as the Motorola Xoom and iPad 2 can't seem to shake. All of the Web's video, animations, games, and ads for better or worse work on the PlayBook, just like they would on your home computer.
There's even a privacy mode for the browser and advanced settings for selectively disabling cookies, WebSockets, and pop-ups. The only bad thing we can say about the browser is that it shoehorns the full Web experience onto a screen size that is ill-equipped to take advantage of it. With half the screen real estate of its iOS and Android Honeycomb peers, you spend a lot of time pinching fingers in and out to zoom pages and peer at an uncompromised Web experience through a 7-inch keyhole.
The PlayBook's video output has the unique capability of either mirroring the device's screen, or selectively locking content such as presentation slides or videos to the HDMI output while allowing the device to pursue other tasks or drive the presentation behind the scenes. The upshot of this arguably convoluted system is that the sensitive data stored in these proprietary BlackBerry apps is never actually stored on the PlayBook.
The PlayBook acts as a sort of tablet-size magnifying glass for interacting with these apps, but when the phone is taken away, no trace is left behind. For corporate users wrapped in layers of bureaucratic Enterprise and privacy concerns, the BlackBerry Bridge solution is a selling point that should in theory allow you to immediately integrate the tablet with an existing BlackBerry-based system. Another advantage to the unique dance of device IDs that happens between the PlayBook and a BlackBerry smartphone is the way tethering is handled.
In general, the PlayBook can be tethered over Bluetooth to any tether-friendly smartphone, thus accessing the Internet over the phone's cellular data connection. That 'ol Bridge is still here, which we'll discuss in just a moment, and now users are swimming in a wealth of messaging options. Both Bridge and Messages let you send and receive emails and, should you configure the same email account in both you'll get not one but two notifications with every email you receive!
That is every bit as annoying as it sounds. Thankfully Messages is much more than just email. Through it you can aggregate messaging from Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn -- the most important social network for suits -- though you are limited to only one of each.
Sorry, Twitter schizos. Add a bunch and everything will be all jumbled together into a single view of what's going on. Every friend request, every Twitter DM and every desperate "Know of any openings?
The integrated view is nice if you're a casual communicator, but if you're the social sort things quickly become overwhelming. Thankfully, with a tap in the list of accounts on the left you can display only content from that source, and you can also filter by folder or label, in the case of Gmail.
While you can view other content, this is not a replacement for the various other social apps in there. For example, unlike the generally quite good Facebook app, in Messages you can only view messages, friend requests and events. No status updates here. The email sending interface is clean and simple and pretty much everything you would expect.
There's a box for "To," a box for "Cc," a third for "Subject" and, finally, the place where you type in the body itself. No, Bcc is not supported, but attachments thankfully are, and you can choose any file you like.
Yes, there are new applications to manage these things, too. We signed in with our Gmail and Facebook accounts and the tablet made quick work of our pending appointments, listing them all in a simple, straightforward calendar view. You can create new events and push them to any of those accounts, but the functionality is somewhat limited compared to the real thing. For example, you can create an event on your Google Calendar, but you can't specify anything more than a simple pop-up reminder.
The Contacts app is similarly functional, pulling down whatever your social networks want to serve up. However, it's not particularly smart. For example, we have plenty of friends in LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter who appeared two or three separate times in the list. You can manually link them together if you're so inclined, but that sounds only marginally more entertaining than manually defragmenting your hard drive bit by bit.
As nice as it is to finally have some proper integrated messaging, the most talked-about feature here is the ability to run Android apps right out of the box. You'll find them in the App World -- well, you might find them. RIM didn't want to make these stand out beyond the standard apps, so happening across an official APK is a bit like winning the lottery: you're unlikely to do either by chance.
So we specifically went looking for some clues on what to search for, and we had the most luck poking around the CrackBerry forums for posts by lucky winners. In this thread we found a short list of available apps and downloaded two: the Dolphin HD browser and Pool Break Lite. The apps download and install quickly and smoothly enough, like any other app, and they're listed right next to any native apps with nothing untoward about their icons. Finally, the PlayBook battery life remains impressive.
With my tablet connected to a mobile hotspot all day, various mail going in an out throughout the day and the occasional Web surfing or app download, the PlayBook easily lasts a full day and well into the night. I rarely found myself with a dead tablet, unless I watched a movie or read a book for an extended period of time after a day of use.
I didn't notice any real difference in battery life after the update, which is a good thing, because sometimes adding new features or making significant software changes can greatly affect battery life.
I'm going to get this out of the way first, so I don't have to dwell on it: RIM took too long to get this software update out to PlayBook users. Way too long. But now that the 2. One thing about the PlayBook 2. I've been using the BlackBerry Bridge e-mail app to get my corporate mail via my smartphone since it was released, and that app works in both landscape and portrait modes, so I was accustomed to getting my e-mail in both orientations. Sometimes I lock my PlayBook in portrait mode, when I'm reading, for example, but when I check new messages, it sometimes gets locked in landscape because the mail app is only available this way.
Then I have to unlock my orientation and relock it in portrait again, which gets annoying quickly, especially if you're constantly switching back and forth between apps and mail. The native PlayBook email app also looks very different than the BlackBerry Bridge mail app, and features and functionality are located in different places.
This is not ideal for PlayBook users who employ the native app for personal mail and Bridge for corporate mail, since those users will be constantly switching back and forth between the two. It would have been nice if RIM considered congruity with Bridge when it developed the native mail app. As for the PIM apps, I really like the layout and general functionality of the contacts app, but I wish it didn't pull in all of my Twitter and Facebook contacts, since some of them, especially my Twitter contacts, aren't personal friends or acquaintances, and their listing just gets in the way of my legit contacts.
This contacts auto-population feature could be valuable in some instances, but you should have more control over which social contacts appear in your address book. However, I've yet to find more than a handful of quality Android apps via BlackBerry App World, which greatly diminishes the value of the feature.
On the other hand, I have found quite a few cool Android apps that you can "sideload" onto the PlayBook. This issue isn't Android-specific, or Playbook-specific; it's a problem for the BlackBerry platform as a whole. BlackBerry's lack of apps from major software makers and other organizations--including three out of leading professional sports leagues in the United States--makes it hard to feel confident in the future of BlackBerry or to sink your cash into a PlayBook tablet.
Apps aren't everything; if they were, I think RIM would be hurting even more. One way would be to remove or address some of the restrictions that keep all Android apps from being compatible with the Android Player. And they'll also have to upgrade their BES software to the latest version v5.
And even though doing so will offer IT a new, cleaner UI and some additional features--Mobile Fusion will soon support iOS and Android management, as well--that still means IT shops must dish out some cash for upgrades.
It's unfortunate that the PlayBook can't just connect to current versions of BES out of the box, because IT could then support it using the software they already have. Read more details on this new relationship from Alan Panezic. And because the PlayBook now supports ActiveSync, a few things may change on the back end for administrators. This fact has a number of implications for IT, most notably that BlackBerry services won't use the same data compression technology as they did in the past, which could be an issue for international travelers who roam on different cellular networks.
Roaming data can be very pricey in these cases, so the old data compression methods had the potential to save significant cash for workers who frequently travel internationally. One major complaint I have with the BlackBerry PlayBook browser is that it crashes frequently, often when I have multiple tabs or other applications open. And the browser doesn't give me any option to restore the previously opened tabs.
Overall, the PlayBook browser is a great tablet browser--it beats out the currently available iPad and the Chrome beta for Android 4. This is a minor gripe, as I can click the "enter" arrow on the keyboard to confirm my password, but it still frustrates me, and I wish RIM had moved the password box up on the screen to address the issue. My final complaint relates more to the PlayBook hardware than software, but it's a major issue that's keeping the PlayBook from competing with today's leading tablets: Despite RIM's February promise to deliver 4G versions of the PlayBook, no cellular PlayBook is available to date.
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