Tablet Review – Blackberry Playbook

I won a pass to Blackberry DevCon Asia 2011 and with that, a 16GB Blackberry Playbook which Research in Motion (RIM) gives out to every attendee. I must specifically thank Ridzuan of ridz.sg whose wall post in Facebook introduced me to the contest for the passes. Otherwise I would never have the opportunity to attend the one and only Blackberry DevCon Asia held in Singapore because I realised that some of the other attendees paid something in the range of US$150 (or perhaps more) to attend. On top of which, the event was to be held in Bangkok originally and it was hastily relocated to Singapore because of the floods there.

I had wanted a Playbook ever since it was released. That is in spite of the iPad and the myriad of tablets (Android or otherwise) out there. I even went as far as asking an old army buddy who now works in the U.S. to get one for me off Best Buy. Unfortunately, it ran out of stock before Black Friday and for a brief moment I was actually tempted to get an Amazon Kindle Fire (which according to some articles from tech sites or blogs, has more or less the same specifications as the Playbook except the camera and some other stuff.). Thus, winning the pass to the DevCon and then the Playbook was my Christmas present for this year. Again, I must thank Ridzuan, and also to Lewis PR Singapore which provided the passes to be won in this contest.

Being at the conference changed my perception of RIM some what. Though most would normally associate RIM and Blackberry with enterprise / corporate users and would hardly consider Blackberry to be cool, it was quite an eye opener to discover that outside North America, there is actually quite a large Blackberry non-business user community in Indonesia and also the Philippines. These non-business users are very active on the social media platforms in their countries and are driving much of the development of applications for Blackberry. Contrary to all the doom and gloom we normally read on the main stream media and most tech sites or blogs, RIM does not appear to be dying off and is fast expanding in this part of the world. That said, I must also point out that there are more than one way to read statistics so naysayers could also say that RIM is either just putting on a bold face to the ‘ever-increasing darkness engulfing it’ or simply ‘failing to understand and react to the gravity of the situation’. Whatever the case is, I would still say that the folks at RIM do have a course charted out and it is too early to say whether it is a vision or a delusion.

Ok, enough of ‘selling koyo’ (Singlish for “doing publicity”) for RIM and let me get on to the Playbook. Personally speaking, I liked the set – not so much because it has Flash (because I have tested a Flash game on Facebook and the performance was not really impressive), but because it has one of the most “complete” browser for a tablet. It felt a little heavy originally but that was because I have rarely touched the other tablets. At 7.6″ wide, the size is just nice as I can hold it comfortably in two hands in landscape mode and the keys on the virtual keyboard are just right allowing me to hold it with both hands type away with ease as most the alphabets within the reach of my thumbs. The only thing I don’t like here is there is no Chinese input! Still, the screen is just right and the graphics are good. As a result, the Playbook has replaced the Omnia7 as my device of choice for watching downloaded videos. I still love my Omnia7, but in my opinion RIM did put some thoughts into the design here and contrary to what the deceased Steve Jobs believed, 7″ tablets are not dead on arrival.

Anyway, from what I know there are no 3G versions of the Playbook. All of them comes with WIFI only and that initially seems rather inhibitive to me. Going to the options I discovered that I can tether it to a tether-capable smartphone and so I don’t really care. After all, I thought that would spare me from upgrading to newer LTE or 4G enabled tablets as long as I have a 4G capable smartphone that allows tethering. The loading of pages when the Playbook is tethered is not visibly slower than native 3G in an area with good connection though it can get absolutely annoying in a moving train or car. I used a Blackberry Bold2 for tethering and the only thing I didn’t like about it is that it cease receiving emails on the Blackberry in “modem enabled mode”. (The Bold2 is a company issued set and company policy locked down Blackberry Bridge so to my annoyance I was unable to test it out. Damn the frakkers who wrote the IT policies in head office!)

Next, I would like to talk about how I used it. Having a full feature browser is nice, because I can access Facebook and Youtube in their full glory. In the case of Facebook, there are certain things that can only be done on the site itself, such as defining the privacy of certain posts I want to made. While the Facebook app is convenient, it comes nowhere close to the finesse that the site provides.

But in spite of the brower’s strength, email was a little of a pain in the ass. After 3 days I have failed to find a way to get the same version I see on the PC to load on the Playbook. It loads a version of Gmail, Yahoo Mail etc that doesn’t look like the crappy mobile site but yet it is not the one I see on the PC. I was unable to attach photos I have on the Playbook using Gmail. That made it difficult for me to send photos on my Playbook to my friends or even to myself so I can extract the photo on a PC without the Blackberry Desktop program. It took me some time to find a way past this shortcoming to send the screen shots I made on the device (see mini slideshow below). I finally understand the reason behind the endless rants over the lack of a native email app on this beautiful device. It is an Achilles heel that RIM should make all haste to address instead of waiting until Feb 2012. After all, consumers do not wait for manufacturers when rivals are producing newer (and seemingly better and ‘more advanced’ products every 9 ~ 12 months). The longer RIM takes to address these shortcomings, the harder will it be for RIM to catch up with its rivals. (And talking about screen shots, it is so easy to do so on the Playbook. Meanwhile, there is still no simple way for me to take them on Windows Phone 7. Just what the hell is taking Microsoft so long to come up with one?)

[portfolio_slideshow]
Click here if the slideshow does not load

Onward to the apps. I have always been in the opinion that it doesn’t matter how many apps there are on for a platform because most of us generally just use a handful. It really doesn’t matter whether the iPad or Android has an app for everything as long as the most common ones are available. Sadly, I had so far failed to find the common apps like Windows Live Messenger, Twitter and Whatsapp for the Playbook even though they exists on the Blackberry smartphones. I have to say that wouldn’t go much to endear the Playbook to potential buyers and it makes it rather difficult for me to introduce or promote it to my friends. (Even when I consider myself sort am a pseudo-fanboi for RIM devices, I have to be honest to my friends. I won’t do a Steve Jobs on them and have them buy the bullshit of shortcomings and bugs being a feature! Neither do I expect them to use it the way I do.)

RIM claims to have 50,000 apps for the Blackberry though I suspect that include those for its mobiles running on Blackberry OS 5, 6 and 7. In short, until RIM move on the Blackberry OS 10 (the new name for QNX) for all its devices, I don’t expect the situation with the availability of apps for the Playbook to improve much in the short term. However, I believe RIM also knows and understands their shortcoming in this area and is addressing it with Android Player and also their new drive to encourage developers to convert their Android apps for OS 10. If things go the way as RIM envisioned it, then I am not surprised to see a larger take up rate for the Playbook in the future. (I might be wrong here, but I am a user and not a developer so pardon me for looking at it differently from the other side.)

To end, even though I won’t say I love the Playbook, it has come very very close to my expectation as an alternative to a laptop. While I wouldn’t go so far to say that the Playbook is a class of its own due to my lack of experience with other tablets, I would be able to spare myself from bringing a laptop out on certain occasions. While I had point out the shortcomings of the lack of a native email client and common apps, I still felt the tech reviews which concentrate on bashing it on these matters are really doing the Playbook no justice. My friend “FoxTwo” once pointed out to me back then when he was using an older smartphone that did not have an app, he was still able to get what he wanted out of the Internet via some sites. A app does make things more convenient, but the full feature browser of the Playbook makes up for some of the shortcomings in that department. Maybe the reason I didn’t find the Playbook lacking is because I used it very much like how I used my laptop / desktop, not to mention that I generally try to exhaust all my options in getting things done on a device before I start complaining about it.

I’ll end here and my suggestion for those who are interested in this device to go check out those sets on display especially when it has a WIFI connection. Try do some of the things that other tablets cannot do with their browsers. You might actually find that it suits your needs in spite of the reviews.

Tech Review – BlackBerry OS6

BlackBerry OS6 is finally available to non-touch devices like the 9700 Bold 2 in Singapore some time last week. I have been dying to get it loaded onto my Bold 2 since the Torch was released, for the simple reason that it comes with the new WebKit browser. Once Ridzuan mentioned on Plurk he was installing OS6 on his BlackBerry, I immediately proceed to Starhub’s download page via BlackBerry’s site to obtain a copy.

Other than the fact that it took a little bit of time downloading it, upgrading over the previous version was a breeze for me, though I am not really sure whether it was really a quick install or I was simply too busy doing other things to keep track of the time that day. Once it has completed booting up, the BES [BlackBerry Enterprise Server] Activation kicked in on its own to reactivate after a while. After that, I began to explore the features.

BlackBerry OS6 has added two main new features, such as ‘Trays’ and the ‘Universal Search’ – which allows me to quickly search items on the device to find what I want. This is way better that the previous versions of the OS, in which searching for items can sometimes be a real pain.

However, I start experiencing some odd issues the next day. For the whole of the next morning, I was forced to repeatedly restart the handset because it always appear to be busy loading some thing – a little timer icon keeps appearing (much like Windows’ annoying hourglass). The set’s performance became so sluggish to the point of being unusable and I had contemplated wiping it using Javaloader to reload the previous OS version. I checked the remaining space and I ruled out a memory leak issue because that number remained fairly stable. However, the set miraculously recovered in the afternoon and it has since been behaving. I have no idea what caused that period of sluggishness, since I had made no changes on the set to make it go away.

The browser is nice, and now there are separate icons for the BlackBerry Browser and the Internet Browser (at least for this version for StarHub, since Ridzuan informed me that there was only one browser icon on his). If I recalled correctly, the user has to go into the options to set it so the handset ‘knows’ which browser to go through in the older version. It took me a while to understand the difference between the two, and that is the BlackBerry Browser loads data through BES (or BIS, depending on what the user subscribes to). In the case of the BES, it allows companies to block out undesirable sites and grant access to the company’s intranet on the handset. My understanding is that all data going through the BlackBerry Browser is via the BES (or BIS), and thus ‘free’ for a user with an unlimited BlackBerry access plan.

On the other hand, the Internet Browser loads sites via the ISP instead, and if a user is not careful he will incur a whole load of data charges. This simply means anyone can buy a BlackBerry and use it without the push mail services, though I wonder what is the point of doing so. However, please do not just take my word for it on this matter and make sure to check with the telco. I will not take any responsibilities if anyone incur a large phone bill as a result of the data charges! (I also noticed that the WAP Browser icon is missing and I don’t miss it, since it is my opinion that WAP is obsolete.)

I put the webkit browser through the Acid3 test and it scored a nice 100/100. That was way better than the one on the previous OS which scored just 92 (and even better than that Windows Phone 7 one on the Samsung Omnia7 which never gets past 12/100). It also has tabbed browsing which means I can open several pages and toggle between them. Unfortunately, there is one thing about the browser I didn’t like – and that is I keep getting the message that some sites are too large to load and the tab has to be closed which became very annoying.

Even so, I liked the OS way better than all the versions before. For those who are supporting BlackBerry smartphones in the corporate, it will take a little getting used to. As far as I am concerned, the items under the ‘Options’ icon has changed rather drastically. My recommendation is to get OS6 on at least a set used by those providing support simply to learn how to navigate around it and guide users over the phone.

The following are some screen shots I took from the handset using a 3rd party software… and talking about that, will Research In Motion [RIM] put in that nifty feature which allows me to just press a few buttons and capture the screen like the iPhone iCrap? I thought that would be neat!

[portfolio_slideshow]

Tech Guide – Unlocking the Blackberry 8707h

As a result of the acquisition and re-alignment of the business by the new owner, part of the business in Tokyo folded and the remaining staff were relocated to the owner’s office there. Tokyo’s function as the regional HQ is now superseded by the Singapore office and with the departure of staff, that also means Blackberry handsets being returned to the company. Since Tokyo has no use of them, we requested that they ship them to us as spares, just in case a careless user lose or break his / her current one.

So 15 Blackberry 8707h purchased from NTT Docomo were sent to us. When the sets arrived, I unpacked a set and tested it with a Blackberry service enabled SIM card from a local telcos. To my disappointment, it showed that the SIM card was invalid (see screen shot).

Undaunted, I borrowed a SIM card from a colleague (which is from another local telco) and the end result was the same. Fed up, I wipe the handset with JL cmder, and installed the latest version of the device software for the 8707-series downloaded from Singtel. Sadly, the set still showed that the SIM card was invalid, and suspecting that this SIM card slot of this set might be faulty, I tested the 2 SIM cards on another set with the same result.

By now, I was quite convinced that these Blackberry handsets are locked down by Docomo. To confirm my suspicion, my colleague in Tokyo was kind enough to call up and check. Docomo confirmed it, but its sales representative refused to release the unlock code to us. They cited that it is company policy, even though we tried explaining that we need the unlock codes so ‘a colleague from Tokyo who is attached here for an extended period’ can use a pre-paid SIM in Singapore. I even tried asking someone who has a working relation with Research in Motion [RIM] to check with their representative, but there was no luck in obtaining any help from them either.

I refused to believe that I am now stuck with 15 Blackberry handsets that is no better than paper weight or bricks, and began my search for alternatives to unlock them. There were 4 options available to me: obtain the MEP unlock code from the telco, buy the unlock code from third party vendors, purchase a proprietary device that will unlock any Blackberry, or use a software to remove the lock.

So, I began searching for MEP codes, just like someone using pirated software would search for hacks or keygens. No joy there, since I quickly discovered that MEP codes are unique and tied to the IMEI number of the handset itself. While there are sites which would provide the MEP code, they charge a small fee ranging from £12.99 to USD $59 per set. (These codes do work, since a friend of mine bought a Blackberry Storm from Verizon and had it unlocked that way previously.)

As for proprietary unlocking devices, a quick search on Google revealed that it costs at least USD $199 a unit. Since I ain’t into a mobile phone / Blackberry unlocking business, there is no reason to purchase one. Simply put, I am not willing to pay even a cent for a set that is owned by the company, not to mention no one is ever going to approve the cost for any of the above solutions!

I kept on searching and I discovered a remark in a forum whereby someone claimed he is able to unlock any Blackberry using something called ‘MML’. Curious, I went looking up for it and I found that it is actually a software called MFI Multiloader – MML for short (see below).

This seems like a software which copyright is owned by RIM itself. If so, RIM does have the means to unlock any Blackberry and on hindsight, I realized that on ethical grounds alone, RIM cannot and will not help someone unlock handsets sold to a telco. After all, the telcos are RIM’s main customers!

I am not going into the details how I obtained MFI Multiloader. The reason being that during my search, I came across a blog post indicating that RIM has requested for the files to be taken down and I want to keep the source alive so another person can use this solution. It shouldn’t be difficult locating the files and the instructions by searching Google anyway. The pre-requisites are: BlackBerry Desktop Manager v4.7.0.32 (without installing the Automatic Update service), Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0, the MFI Multiloader installer itself, and an archive split in eight .rar files. I had Blackberry Desktop Manager v5 previously but MML does not work until I uninstalled it and reinstall v4.7.0.32. The files in the .rar archive are to be restored over the existing ones in C:MML only after MML is installed.


WARNING:
1. This does not seems to be working with the Blackberry Bold and Storm. Try at your own risk.
2. Please first download a suitable device software for the device from the RIM website and have it installed into the PC before proceding with the following.


After all the necessary components are installed, everything was quite straight forward from here on. First, load MML by double clicking its icon on the desktop. Ensure that both the boxes for ‘Full Erase’ and ‘Auto Start’ are checked. Then plug the Blackberry 8707h in and whatever the program is designed to do will kick in (see below).

I did not record how long it will take for the whole process, but MML will wipe the Blackberry handset (more thoroughly than JL Cmder will) along with the lock that the telco (in this case, Docomo) has placed. When it is done, you will be shown the following and you can now exit MML.

The following blurry pictures are what is displayed on the Blackberry 8707h after MML has completed its task. (below, left). Type ‘START’ on the Blackberry keypad, and you will see the next screen (below, right). The set is now ready to be reloaded with its device software. (I tried using JL Cmder to screen capture these without any luck.)

To do so, run Application Loader (loader.exe in C:Program FilesCommon FilesResearch In MotionAppLoader). Anyone who has experience with reloading Blackberry device software onto the handset will be familiar with this and I believe no screen shots are required here.

The screen capture on the right shows the powered up and unlocked Blackberry 8707h after the device software has been reinstalled. It now happily recognises the SIM card from M1 network and has established a 3G connection on the M1-GSM network. While this takes some effort to do, it’s completely free. Of course, if you are an owner of just ONE Blackberry and wish to unlock your set for use with another network, the best option would be to pay and use the unlocking services. It saves you all the trouble and you don’t have to worry about breaking your set.


Disclaimer: I take no responsibilities if anyone breaks (or ‘bricks’) a Blackberry handset following the instructions above. Follow these instructions at your own risk as I believe the telcos will not honor their warranty agreement under such circumstances.


Funny Video: