Apps and App Store, Browser


Apps and App Shop

The existent key to the practicality of a tablet or smartphone today are the apps that come with information technology and the availability of more apps to expand its usefulness. Apple tree's iPad has over 65,000 apps gear up to get in the iTunes App Store, as well as strong email, contact, and agenda apps pre-installed. Google'south Android three.0 Honeycomb platform only has a scattering of tablet specific apps currently, but it does provide stellar core apps to manage email, IM, contacts, and calendar and can run existing Android smartphone apps.

Unfortunately, this is where the PlayBook falls flat on its face. RIM has opted not to offer a handful of core applications that any user would expect to see on a modernistic mobile Bone, specially 1 as flashy as the BlackBerry Tablet OS. The PlayBook has to rely on the browser for standard tasks such equally email and social networking. At that place are shortcuts pre-installed to open up Facebook and Twitter in the browser, but at that place are no native apps for them, and social networking ranks extremely loftier for many tablet buyers. RIM also left out any form of video conferencing to make use of the front-facing camera, which relegates information technology to cocky-portrait use and piffling else.

RIM did pre-install some apps that practise work well, so all is not lost. Word to Go, Canvas to Go, and Slideshow to Go are a range of apps for working with documents, spreadsheets, and PowerPoint presentations, and they piece of work really well. In fact, Word to Get is i of the best mobile word processing experiences we have seen. We would have actually like to accept the power to sync our documents with a cloud service such as Google Docs, and so hopefully that adequacy volition be added afterward on. Kobo Books is the e-reader app offered on the PlayBook. It's not as flashy as the apps for the iPad or even Android, but it gets the job done and offers a store from which you can purchase books straight on the tablet.

The BlackBerry App World is said to offer 3,000 apps at launch. Even so, almost of these are extremely bones and menial, covering redundant things such every bit annotation-taking over and over. A lot of the apps in the App World appear half baked as well, with bugs and poor user experience seen all over the identify. The PlayBook has been promised to support many unlike app platforms, ranging from Coffee to Adobe AIR and even Android apps later down the line. Only at this moment, the app selection is very weak, and actually hampers the potential of the PlayBook.

EA Games developed two headline games for BlackBerry'southward tablet at launch. Need For Speed Undercover and Tetris are ubiquitous on every smartphone or tablet platform, but they work very well on the PlayBook, utilizing the device's built-in gyroscope and accelerometer.


Browser

The PlayBook'south browser elicits a bunch of mixed emotions for united states of america. RIM has touted the browser as offering a desktop experience on a tablet, and has equipped the browser with Adobe Flash Actor, HTML5, JavaScript, and support for many other web technologies. Unfortunately, y'all are spring to see bugs forth the mode which can exist frustrating.

The browser can be very fast at a given moment, and then be very boring and hang the side by side, prompting us to repeatedly striking the reload button. One time pages loaded, scrolling was very fast and pinch-to-zoom was shine and effortless. Video content played well, although at times it, too, could hang.

The browser allows for multiple tabs to be open at the aforementioned fourth dimension, and switching between them is as easy as swiping down from the top of the screen and selecting a unlike tab. Sometimes, though, the PlayBook would not go along a page loaded in retention and information technology would demand to be reloaded when the tab was selected, something we wouldn't have expected from a device packing 1GB of RAM.

The touch on responsiveness in the browser left a scrap to be desired equally well. Sometimes a tap on a link would not be recognized and nosotros would have to printing repeatedly to go the PlayBook to open up the page. Sites with heavy use of AJAX and JavaScript, such as Google Reader and Twitter, could be very slow when scrolling, and buttons would be hit or miss equally to whether they would respond.