Galen Gruman Reviews the BlackBerry PlayBook: ‘Unfinished, Unusable’

Here’s a PlayBook review that doesn’t pull punches:

But I doubt that RIM actually listened to customers or outsiders — the train wreck is just too complete for there to have been anything other than heads deeply buried in sand. Still, it’s one thing to see an impending train wreck and fret. It’s another to view the aftermath — it’s a lot worse than I could have imagined, and it feels awful to look at it.

Why RIM chose to ship the PlayBook in such a state is unfathomable. The iPad 2 and Xoom have been out for weeks, so there’s no heading them off at the pass. Instead, the PlayBook debuted with all eyes on it — but instead of a world-class performer, we got the homeless guy who plays air guitar in front of the mall.

One quibble: Gruman’s paragraph on the PlayBook’s support for Flash:

On the bright side, the PlayBook supports Flash, with no need to download a player as on Android. But Flash objects are often slow to load, and some would not function. That’s an issue Flash also has on Android, as my colleague Neil McAllister discovered in his extensive Flash tests. It’s becoming increasingly clear to me that Flash and mobile don’t mix.

That’s some “bright side”.

★ Friday, 22 April 2011