The BlackBerry Playbook could well be the tablet that changes the game. In a word, it’s a triumph.
We’ve been talking about the Playbook for months now, but only now at CES in Las Vegas have we been able to have a proper play with it. And boy is it impressive.
Running a brand new BlackBerry Tablet OS and powered along by a 1GHz Cortex-A9 dual core processor and 1GB of RAM, it’s without doubt the most impressive iPad rival we’ve seen. It’s so stonkingly awesome, in fact, that we’d say it’s the first tablet that genuinely has a shot at knocking the iPad off its best-in-class pedestal. Yes, it’s that good.
At first sight, the Playbook doesn’t look particularly special. The bezel is quite wide and makes the 7-inch tablet look a bit bloaty. However, unlike all the other tablet devices out there, the Playbook’s bezel packs hidden secrets.
While the touchscreen interface on most tablets extends only to the edge of the screen, the BlackBerry Playbook’s touch features extend right across the bezel in all directions to the edge of the device. And this is integral to the navigation of the operating system.
Swiping your finger from the edge of the device, across the bezel and onto the screen will bring up all manner of options and features, depending on which side you choose to swipe from and which app you’re using. For instance, in the web browser, a swipe from the top down will pull down the tab menu where you can either switch to another tab or open a new one.
It’s surprisingly intuitive and we picked up the basics immediately.
The Playbook packs two cameras – a 3MP front-facing camera and a 5MP rear-facing one. Both produced surprisingly decent images. While we were unable to transfer the pics we took onto another device to have a proper look at them, they looked very good on the Playbook’s own screen. Even the front-facing camera was producing some very sharp shots.
The screen itself is super sharp. The 1024 x 600 resolution is comparable to the 9.7-inch iPad, but because of the Playbook’s 7-inch display, the increased pixel density makes all the difference. It’s sharp and crisp, and HD video looks fabulous.
