The BlackBerry PlayBook isn't just the third major tablet platform to launch, or the first one to deeply poke at figuring out why 7-inch tablets should exist—it's literally the future of BlackBerry, since the QNX-based OS is going to be the gooey software heart of BlackBerry phones in the next year or so.
This is not a bad thing.The first thought that'll ripple through your crinkly brainfolds: "Man, it's tiny." It's also pleasantly minimal, the face a buttonless void. It's a real-world manifestation of the archetypal black slate. Which sounds boring as balls, but it's not, because there's a fairly remarkable precision in the way it matches what you expect a tablet to feel like. Cut like a tall paperback, but just a hair or seven thicker than an iPad 2 (and half as thick at the latest BlackBerry), it's less than a pound. The back is just rubbery enough to feel grippy, but not so rubbery it feels gross. The screen, bright and pop-y (and glosssssy), just a shade short of killer.
PlayBook is the most thoughtful product that RIM's put out in a long time. A BlackBerry has never been this smooth or fluid. It has the best multitasking of any tablet out so far, both in terms of straight-up ballsiness (you can pump 1080p video out to an HDTV via HDMI while dicking around in another app or two back on the tablet and everything runs neatly) and the UI, which it borrows liberally from Palm's webOS. In an app, swiping up from the bezel pulls up the desktop/card view, where you can switch to a different app, or close them by flicking up on card. (Or you can switch directly from app to app by swiping from the left or right bezel. Swiping from the top bezel works like the menu button in Android—sometimes it pulls down additional options or features within the app, sometimes it doesn't.) You can choose how you want to multitask: Full-blown, every app stays open till the PlayBook has to kill them, or the default, where apps pause and resume, like the iPad and Android 3.0. Notifications inobtrusively hang out at the top of the screen.
In a lot of ways, the PlayBook is more polished and usable in its beta state than the Motorola Xoom, and it's straight-up the best seven-inch tablet out there (though in the tango between between portability and size, I think 10 inches is still the best). At the same time, I don't think anyone should buy it right now—BlackBerry user or otherwise—for at least a few months, to see if the platform has enough legs to carry itself to where it needs to be. If the apps do arrive to fill in the gaps, then the PlayBook is totally going to be a tablet to check out. The foundation is solid—I can't wait to see the first phones running this software—it just needs some stuff built on top of it before you can decide whether or not you should move in.
