Blackberry Playbook Review

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.

Talking of video, the Playbook can play Full HD 1080p videos without breaking a sweat. It can also output them via a mini-HDMI connection and, what’s more, it can play more than one HD video at once.

Indeed, if you’re watching an HD video clip, you can swipe the screen to pull up the media menu and switch to watch another video. If you don’t stop or pause the original clip, it’ll continue to play in the background. In the video menu you’ll be able to see both clips’ thumbnails playing side-by-side. Switching between them is quick as you like. There’s no lag, there’s no brief pause. It’s just slick and easy.

We set a couple of HD video clips playing and then opened YouTube in a browser in order to play a Flash video at the same time. We were amazed – it all worked perfectly.

Of course, the battery drain from this kind of intensive processing is likely to be catastrophic. All the samples at the show were plugged into the power so we were unable to test battery performance.

Even if RIM has put the best battery in the world in there, if you buy one you’re going to have to be very careful with how you use the multitasking. It’s so good that it’s exceedingly easy to leave videos and music playing in the background without realising.

Videos aside, general multitasking on the Playbook really is fantastic. It makes the multitasking on Android 2.2 look mediocre, and needless to say it makes the ‘sort of but not really’ faux-multitasking on the iPad and iPhone 4 look utterly last-generation.

The interface is a joy to use and absolutely matches iOS in terms of ease of use. Unfortunately, RIM had disabled the settings menu on all the display samples so we were unable to take a look at that side of things. We’ll have to wait for a proper review sample for that.

But in terms of being able to easily find and load apps, manage your music and videos, play games and browse the web, BlackBerry has an absolute gem on its hands.

The Playbook is due to go on sale in the US within the next few months and should be launching in the UK in the spring. We can’t wait to take another look at it, and of course we’ll bring you our full review as soon as RIM gives us a sample.