Quick Hands On: Blackberry Playbook

We were in an Office Depot yesterday to drop off some packages to be mailed  when I happened to see a display for the Blackberry Playbook. I had seen many online reviews for the tablet but hadn’t actually seen one in the wild yet. We took the opportunity to go check it out and play with it for a bit to see what it had to offer. The consensus was “nothing too special here”.The size and feel of the device was very solid, but after getting past that, it kind of fell apart. We found the UI to not be very intuitive or discoverable. After figuring it out, however, the UI did offer some nice visuals.

After that, it was time to find out what kind of applications this thing had to offer. This was a source of disappointment. It seemed like every time I launched an app, Twitter, Facebook, and so on, it was simply just launching the browser and taking me to the website of those services.. I would assume there are third party applications in their catalog that are native code, this demo unit just wasn’t loaded with any.

Finally the price. At $499, $599, and $699, I am not really sure you are getting your moneys worth. If you are a die hard blackberry user and this thing integrates with that experience for you well, then great, otherwise I would say hold off.