After all the reviews and votes. . .

The iPad and iOS has had its coverage. Android tablets like the XOOM are getting more popular. Enter Blackberry, and their new foray into the tablet market, the Playbook.

Out of the box, the Playbook is different. As a smaller, 7-inch tablet, it has an over-large edge. It’s hard to ignore and makes the playbook screen feel too small. This makes the screen seem immediately smaller and explains the non-standard and awkward 1024×600 resolution. If you can get be the severely reduced screen size, you discover the real reason behind the oversized border.

As it turns out, the Playbook’s outer edge frame of the screen is touch sensitive and key to the uniqueness of its operating system. Swiping from the bottom frame up to the center of the screen the equivalent of other tablets’ home button and is the only way to get from the home screen from within an app. Swiping from the side of the frame into the middle allows you to switch through apps, similar to Alt-Tabbing in Windows. These unique features of the OS immediately grabbed my attention and truly differentiates Blackberry Tablet OS (QNX) from its competitors.
Blackberry Playbook Home Screen
From a technical standpoint, the Playbook is every bit as good as many of its competitors. The 1Ghz dual core A9 processes is nearly identical to the Motorola XOOM’s Tegra 2, without the NVIDIA graphics processor (GPU). But the Playbook isn’t without its share of graphical power. It shows off its power with Need for Speed: Undercover, a fully rendered, fast-paced racing game that never hiccuped or dropped a frame once on me. Not only that, when I returned to the home screen, looking at all the apps in a row, I was still able to steer and play the game in the little mini-window. Very impressive. The Playbook also has an HDMI output – Nice!

The web browser fully supports Adobe Flash, JavaScript and was very impressive with nearly all HTML5 features. It rendered pages extremely quickly and the pinch-zoom capabilities were blindingly quick.

Overall, the whole tablet is fast and responsive… Probably the most responsive tablet I’ve used. I can even overlook the small screen size, however, that’s were I have to stop giving praise. Natively, very few apps are installed on the Playbook right out of the box. Blackberry AppWorld is nice, but the selection is extremely limited. Facebook is the only native app of any use. There are no apps for Twitter, Gmail – or any email abilities for that matter.

The current version of the Playbook is designed to be used in conjunction with your Blackberry smartphone. If you have a Blackberry, you use an app called “Blackberry Bridge” that pushes your email from your Blackberry to the Playbook. While the home screen included icons for Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo, they simply pull up the browser app. This is fine for simple things like email and Google calendar. However, Google maps requires a scroll wheel to zoom. Pinching zooms the browser, not the map. In a quick aside, Bing and Blackberry have teamed up to provide map and search services for the Playbook, so you likely won’t see MapQuest or Google Maps on it.

I have both an iPad tablet and Android devices. Blackberries pre-dated both, however RIM is behind in the app game. Even Amazon has surpassed them for apps. I’m used to quality Android apps that help me be more productive. Nearly all of them are free. I’ve bought only one in the past two years because I wanted a few additional features. Google Docs, Catch, and other document apps are free. iPad apps are also good in quality. The best ones, however, are $5-$10. Keynote and the other iPad office apps are all $9.99.

I will say that the Playbook office suite apps are incredible. I was able to create simple documents in the Word Processor, and the spreadsheet app was equally impressive. And, the Playbook presentation viewer was incredible! It allowed me to view speaker notes and a scrolling list of upcoming slides on the Playbook, while presenting full screen via the HDMI out in presenter mode. Jumping between slides and back again was incredulously quick, even with other apps running.

BlackBerry App World on PlaybookWhen buying a tablet, you must ask yourself: What are you looking for? What do you want to do with it? The Playbook was truly designed for business users who are truly loyal to RIM and can’t live without their Blackberry devices. I don’t have one and am not a fan of how they do email. However, the office integration was a wonderful experience. The device was designed with a form factor that could fit in your suit coat pocket. It measures about 5″ by 7.5″, less than a half-inch thin and weighs in at under a pound. It handles standard 802.11 Wireless B, G and N with 3G and 4G models to come out later and it’s priced under $500.

To sum up, I’m very impressed by the speed and responsiveness of the Playbook. The Playbook’s “QNX” is an impressive operating system that both iOS and Android could learn from. If you’re a current Blackberry user, this is your tablet. I’ve been informed that future Playbook models will include some sort of email client that does not rely on a Blackberry phone (for the rest of us). While I’m not sold on the Playbook now, those future models may truly be worth checking out.

And the Winner is... the Apple Ipad !