BlackBerry PlayBook: The big sibling (as opposed to little)
So the BlackBerry tablet device — the PlayBook — bas been announced, here:
RIM introduces PlayBook — the BlackBerry tablet
(Engadget)
and rebutted here:
The BlackBerry PlayBook Doesn’t Exist
(Justice Gödel Condor)
And perhaps the second most interesting thing about the announcement is the music playing behind the ad:
To me, the most interesting thing about it is the pairing. Well, after the question of whether or not it exists, of course. Anyway, I find this design philosophy really intriguing, because the design philosophy of an artifact often finds its way into many or most of the artifact’s details. And here, the pairing is arguably the most striking element of RIM’s design philosophy for the device, so it has the potential to lead the device in a lot of interesting directions.
Let’s compare this thing to the iPad: the PlayBook is the phone’s big sibling, whereas the iPad is the desktop’s little sibling.
It’s all about the pairing, in my opinion. The iPad is (currently) useless without an OSX-based machine to pair it to, at least at initialization. The big sibling to which you attach it provides backups and, at least initially, all of the authentication and personal information needed. This may change in the near future (evidently the device will soon get the ability to print documents, for example—woo!). But currently, it is a slave device. A really cool, easy-to-use, remarkably powerful slave device, but a slave nonetheless.
The PlayBook is paired to the phone: it is a big sibling. If RIM allows this philosophy to pervade their design decisions, then the device has serious potential to be powerful in ways that the iPad (currently) is not. The iPad is currently not designed to be a standalone computer, and I believe much of that is due to its little-sibling status. The PlayBook could potentially attract some market attention away from the iPad if the big-sibling status becomes their rallying point … make this device the functional equivalent of a laptop (in terms of capabilities), and you’ll make a lot of people very happy.
I have an iPad. I love using it, and my kids fight each other to use it. However, I have not yet purchased an iPad for my parents, because it is not the equivalent of a standalone laptop/desktop yet … you can’t print from it, you can’t Skype on it, you can’t backup its contents without tethering it to a host computer, etc. It will be interesting to see how many of these issues RIM addresses with the gen1 version … when/if it comes out.
