Why RIM’s PlayBook is no iPad-killer

The BlackPad — officially named the PlayBook — has finally exited the blogosphere’s rumor mill and made its onstage debut, at yesterday’s BlackBerry DevCon conference. The (carefully controlled and edited) demos are sleek, and they just scream “iPad slickness.” Research in Motion touted the device’s business-readiness and its support for Adobe’s Flash Player 10.1 — both intended as subtle put-downs of the Apple iPad.

But if you look beyond the slick presentation, you’ll begin to suspect that there’s less than meets the eye. Of course, the product isn’t real yet, so the gaps the slick demos smoothed over may be fixed when the product ultimately ships. But I doubt it — it’s a rare product that lives up to the initial demo.

Case in point: Microsoft’s increasingly feature-lacking Windows Phone 7 and the whole slew of iPad competitors that shipped (or were announced) earlier this year that are already dead and forgotten. Ironically, it was the iPad that was better in its shipping version than in its prerelease demos, as Apple cannily showcased a subset of features in what now seems as a way to get people speculating to keep the buzz going.

Where are the apps? The big miss is the set of apps available. Apparently, there are none beyond the basics that RIM provides, such a calendaring and contacts. Because the PlayBook uses a new operating system based on the QNX microkernel implementation of Posix (a form of Unix), the Java ME-based BlackBerry OS apps won’t run on it. (RIM bought QNX less than a year ago.) So, BlackBerry developers and users alike must start over again for apps.

There may not be a lot of good BlackBerry apps available, but the ability to run them on the PlayBook would have been a great boon for early adopters. Apple certainly showed the value of that app-compatibility strategy in the iPad’s support of iPhone apps, which gave users instant capabilities on their new devices plus gave developers an easy transition to native iPad app delivery.

Ultimately, there wil be native PlayBook apps, of course, but RIM is just now making the development platform available, giving developers little time to get apps ready in time for the early 2011 availability of the device. At that time, there’ll be a half-dozen or more Android-based competitors available from Cisco Systems, Hewlett-Packard, HTC, and Samsung, with native apps long in development. And you can bet the iPad 2 will be announced in January or February and released in the spring, given Apple’s clocklike release schedule.

So the PlayBook will come out fairly appless competing with the established iPad and all its apps and the slew of new Android slates and all their apps. Good luck. I’ve been using an iPad for a couple months now and can attest to how important native apps are to its utility — its Web and media capabilities are great, but not sufficient.

It’s true that the PlayBook also supports Adobe Flash, Adobe AIR, and Oracle Java, so apps for those client environments could run on the PlayBook — assuming that their mouse-based interfaces can be well mapped to touch gestures. That’s easier said than done, as Microsoft’s disappointing Windows touch UI has shown. (And Apple’s refusal to support them has had no discernible effect on its mobile devices’ adoption, though that may be because most other devices don’t support them either.)

You will also be able to use HTML5 apps on the PlayBook, but that’s just matching what the iPad and coming Android slates can do. It’s no reason to choose a PlayBook.

The security illusion RIM is boasting that the PlayBook is enterprise- and CIO-ready. What does that mean? Just that it uses the same security and management tool (BlackBerry Enterprise Server) as the BlackBerry smartphones. That’s to be expected — and in fact required by IT. But the implication that the use of BES to make the PlayBook enterprise-ready somehow means the iPad is not enterprise-ready is a falsehood. The fact is, iOS 4’s security and manageability capabilities are more than adequate for the vast majority of enterprises — and they support the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad equally.

Security and manageability are no longer legitimate reasons (except in a few industries) to disallow iOS devices. RIM would like to pretend otherwise, but it’s simply not true. However, it is legitimate to say that the Android OS is not able to meet basic enterprise security and manageability requirements.

Too small of a device? The PlayBook will have a 7-inch widescreen display, so the unit is smaller than an iPad. I suspect that will make Web pages and videos feel cramped. Even on the iPad’s 9.7-inch screen, many Web pages feel tight to me, given that most are now designed for 19-inch monitors. Ditto for business-oriented apps, such as presentation and editing tools — especially when the onscreen keyboard is visible.

The 7-inch tablets I’ve seen have all felt awkwardly sized, and I’m hard-pressed to see how the PlayBook will not suffer the same squeeze.

Some intriguing developments Still, the PlayBook has some interesting capabilities that could appeal to users and should be examined by competitors:

• Phone tethering. You’ll be able to tether a PlayBook to a BlackBerry via Bluetooth, using its 3G data plan to access the Internet; Wi-Fi is also supported. That tethering is something the iPad would benefit from (so far, AT&T won’t allow this), as would the coming Android slates, which may or may not support tethering, based on carrier restrictions. But you won’t be able to use the PlayBook directly over a 3G connection — you must have a BlackBerry to do so. That’s a self-interested choice by RIM that will backfire, as it unnecessarily locks users into specific phones. It would have better to have a Wi-Fi-only version for use in secure IT environments (such as hospitals) and for use in homes as entertainment devices, and a separate Wi-Fi-plus-3G version for those who need conectivity everywhere — in other words, the dual versions Apple did for the iPad.
• Mirrored BlackBerry. The Bluetooth tethering also lets the PlayBook act as a larger screen for a BlacKBerry, providing access to the BlackBerry’s apps and data in a sort-of mirroring mode much like attachig a larger monitor to a laptop. This is the only way to “run” BlackBerry apps on a PlayBook, though doing so means burning through battery life on the two devices. While it probably doesn’t make sense for iPads to mirror iPhones — they can simply run the same apps and access the same cloud-based data, after all — or for Android slates to mirror Android smartphones, the concept could be used by other mobile devices to dock them to monitors and input devices such as when working at someone else’s office.
• Multicore processing. The PlayBook’s 1GHz processor (RIM won’t say which processor it is using) is multicore, which means that the PlayBook will be able to run multiple apps simultaneously and share the workload across the two processor cores, like a desktop PC or laptop does. That should make multitasking smoother than what most mobile devices today can do. Apple’s iPad won’t support multitasking until November, and then only for apps designed specifically to use Apple’s multitasking API.

I have no doubt that the PlayBook will find an audience. BlackBerry afficionados — especially those not abandoning the platform for more modern devices — will give it top consideration for sure. But it’ll be the core BlackBerry audience, which is not growing. The iPad has too much going for it, even with its limitations, and Android’s snowballing strength means it’s the platform that will get carriers’ and users’ focus as the non-Apple alternative.

The PlayBook would have been an amazing device a year ago. Today, it looks like a shrunken iPad clone that is betting on Flash support and USB ports to get a user base — rather than the apps that ultimately create user joy and loyalty.

This article, “Why RIM’s PlayBook is no iPad-killer,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Gruman et al.’s Mobile Edge blog and follow the latest developments in mobile technology at InfoWorld.com.