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?)

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.