**DISCLAIMER** I wrote this out of frustration. I am not editing it in any way except for this disclaimer. I DO like the PlayBook, I seriously and honestly do. I am just frustrated with it. DEVELOPERS: Keep Developing. Give us a reason to want it more, to want two (for whatever reason), and if anything to throw it in iPad owners faces. RIM: Prove me wrong. That's not a challenge, that's a real request. Force me into a retraction. Make me love it again. I LIKE it.. but I want to love it.... Make it happen. **END DISCLAIMER**
I gave it a chance. I was there at 6am on April 19th waiting for it. I brought it home, and marveled in its construction, its feel, and its slick QNX operating system that we were promised would be the best thing to come out of RIM since the the first Berry rolled off the line many years back. I waited - Patiently - for the promised updates. I waited some more. Updates came and brought pretty much fuck all. [sarcasm] Airplane mode was nice, so was Demo mode or whatever it's called[/sarcasm]. I waited, and waited. 60 days came and went.. no native email and no useful calendar (Fuck you Bridge fans. I don't even wanna hear about how it works with Bridge - I KNOW and it's NOT ENOUGH).
"Shit my Blackberry is in the car but I need a phone number, I'll just check my Playb..... oh wait"
Yeah that happened too.
I hated on RIM pretty bad. I was sitting with a 9780 and a 9800 that were both due for the shredder, and nothing in sight from RIM. ENTER THE 9900! "ZOMG I LOVE RIM! I'M PRETTY SURE THIS PHONE WAS CAST FROM ANGEL TEARS!!!!!!"... Those were my thoughts for a few weeks, and don't get me wrong, I love my 9900. I personally think its one of the finest pieces of smartphone gear ever made.
That's not the subject at hand here. What I am here to discuss is the little engine that couldn't AKA the BlackBerry Playbook.
I'm done with this friggin thing. The hurry up and wait game is over, and I'm not looking back. It's a shame since the hardware and screen are unparallelled in the tablet world, but the OS and the lack of anything remotely useful aside from the browser makes it immediately worthless. It's like running a Ferrari 360 that's governed to 40kph. Its painful because I WANT to love this thing, I just can't. I side loaded the Android player a few weeks before a random RIM update nuked it, and I saw potential. Now today we get the news that pretty much any half decent Android app is going to be useless on the PB. Thanks RIM, we'd expect nothing less than another halfassed piece of software.
Today the value of a PlayBook dropped to "junk stock" status. Amazon just cloned it (with lesser specs, I know), and the price point they are launching the Fire at has pretty much put the PlayBook into the Endgame part of its short life. I hadn't written the PB off until this afternoon, but now that I have given it some thought, I firmly believe it's over.
2.0 should have come out the SECOND Amazon ended that press conference. It would have been a welcome "Fuck you Amazon, we got this" from RIM. Nothing came. Their (many) twitters went on about finding your ringtones and random shit about Adobe that no one really cares about. No mention of anything related to the curb stopming they just got from Amazon.
Goodbye PlayBook. You'll find a nice home in my closet, and perhaps one day... one day, you'll see the outside world once again.
ASG
