Saying that the PlayBook’s OS – called QNX – is a revelation might be a bit strong. It is more of an iteration, specifically of Palm webOS with a dash of Windows 7 and a touch of the iPad 2. The gestures are similar to the Palm OS in that you swipe to put apps in a window (aka, card).
Like the iPad, you press and hold down on an app icon to move it (the apps throb like a sore tendon) and click a small trash icon to remove them. Swiping worked remarkably well, though, and the QNX interface is quite responsive.
There’s no question that RIM was shooting for the moon when it designed this OS, because it’s highly intelligent. We just can’t recommend the multi-tasking features enough. It’s amazing to record a video, swipe to the left and play a game, go back and see that your video is still recording.
Multi-tasking is not just a gee-whiz feature for swiping open apps. It also means that as an app loads, you can decide to close it as it opens. Or, you can start one app, switch to the home screen, start another, then go back to the first app. It has a robust next-gen tablet feel.
That said, we do have a few complaints. One is that the interface tends to assume a lot of previous knowledge on the part of the user. You never know when you swipe from the bezel down to see settings if the app even has any settings.
The piecemeal part-Apple/part-Palm/part-Android interface sometimes causes confusion. For example, in the browser, you can swipe down to see tabs. When you add one, you’ll see buttons for new pages (think iPad and Palm) but then you can see open tabs like on Android 3.0 devices such as the Xoom.
The PlayBook does support copy and paste, and the interface for this is very simple. You just longpress on an email address or text portion until you see the copy-paste window. Then you can copy the selection or paste. The interface for this works better than the Apple iPad 2 or Motorola Xoom.
Apps?
The PlayBook comes with a selection of apps.
There’s a music player, the Kobo e-book app for buying and reading books, a YouTube app, Bing Maps (which doesn’t include turn-by-turn navigation), a weather app, a clock, the game Need for Speed:
Undercover, an app for taking voice notes, the Adobe PDF Reader, Tetris, links to webmail services like Hotmail and Facebook and Twitter shortcuts.
RIM also includes viewers for Word, Excel and PowerPoint files. You can’t edit these documents, but you can open them and play slideshows. The productivity apps are integrated into the BlackBerry Bridge system, so when you receive an email with a Word doc, you can open it from the email.
Third-party app availability is abysmal. There’s no Skype client, nothing for checking flight status, no official Facebook or Twitter apps, nothing from Google, very few games and few business apps.
There are a few minor exceptions, however. The Adobe Connect app is supposed to let you connect to a web conferencing portal to collaborate on documents and even video chat. But we couldn’t get the app to connect to our test account, even though we could from a computer.
For games, there are one or two good options: Bubble Birds is a Tetris-like puzzle game, and then there’s Tetris itself. App World on BlackBerry phones is not exactly a raging success – there may be a few apps available, but their quality is poor. For the PlayBook to succeed, it needs more apps.
Games on PlayBook – the few that are available – worked well. Need for Speed looked smooth, and the controls for steering worked reliably as expected.
The browser supports Adobe Flash and, for the dozens of sites we tested, worked well. We did have some trouble with sites that block access from tablets, including Hulu.com. And, the more intensive Flash sites, like GamesRadar.com, were a bit slow to load but eventually worked.??
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