Last week BlackBerry announced its BlackBerry PlayBook, a 7” tablet device running a dedicated BlackBerry Tablet OS. It has no price yet, and nobody has touched it. It’s been dubbed BlackBerry’s “iPad killer”, but who would win in a fight, the BlackBerry PlayBook or the Apple iPad?
Portability
The weight of a tablet could mean the difference between you leaving it on the sofa or sticking it in your bag every morning for the commute into work. In the case of a tablet, lighter is better. With the larger screen size, the iPad is heavier, and weighs in at 680g for a Wi-fi only version, or 730g for a Wi-fi and 3G version. The BlackBerry PlayBook on the other hand, is a decidedly lighter 400g. Size wise too, the iPad is clunkier than the BlackBerry PlayBook. Think of it like this: where the iPad is the September issue of Vogue (the biggest one of the year), the BlackBerry PlayBook is a little bigger (but much slimmer) than a standard quality paperback.
Winner: BlackBerry PlayBook
Screen
One of the most important features for a tablet has got to be its screen. We want to watch movies on a tablet, to read newspapers and magazines on a newspaper. Shoot, if the iPad screen was no good then all those crisp adverts in the iPad version of GQ would serve absolutely no purpose! The iPad has a 9.7” LED screen, and 1024×768. The BlackBerry PlayBook has a 7” LCD screen, at 1024×600 resolution. In effect, this means that the pixels in the PlayBook screen are closer together, as the same number of pixels are on a smaller screen. The PlayBook will be sharper, whereas the iPad may have a softness to it. To the naked eye though, there won’t be much difference. Neither can be said to have poor screen quality.
Winner: Everyone’s a winner!
Apps
There’s an easy winner here. The Apple App Store has over 250,000 apps available to date, with over 3,000 of those being for iPad (as of August), whereas the BlackBerry AppWorld only just passed the 10,000 mark. To put this a little more in perspective, Android passed the 80,000 mark recently. In terms of content available for the device, the BlackBerry PlayBook pales in comparison to the iPad.
Winner: iPad
Under the hood and extras
Both the BlackBerry PlayBook and the Apple iPad have a 1GHz processor. Battery life has not been stated for the BlackBerry PlayBook, which isn’t a good sign, and it’s not sounding too good given what’s packed into the operating system. The Apple iPad gets around 10 hours on a good day.
Winner: Too early to say, but Apple is the safer bet
Operating System
The BlackBerry PlayBook runs a new OS, a BlackBerry Tablet OS. This OS is powered by QNX, a company that powers all sorts of odds and sods and very important things too (like tanks and flash cars). It’s got proper multitasking, whereas the iPad multitasking is an illusion of sorts. A 1GB RAM sounds hopeful, and it supports both Flash 10.1 and HTML5, the former of which Apple does not. before the BlackBerry PlayBook gets into our hands, it’s unfair to judge the operating system, and impossible to get a proper handle on how the UI performs in day to day usage. What we do know though, is that Apple’s UI is top of the tree, and BlackBerry will have to pull something special out of the bag to beat it.
Winner: Only time will tell
Conclusion
We won’t get a full picture of whether the BlackBerry PlayBook can topple the iPad from its throne until BlackBerry sets the PlayBook loose. For now, it seems there are some battery issues that BlackBerry has to resolve with the PlayBook. By the time it arrives, in 2011, there may be a second generation iPad on the horizon, and an Apple iOS update may have been rolled out. on top of this, the Android tablet explosion will be gettng into full swing. If and when all these things happen, there could be whole new set of factors for the PlayBook to compete with.
What do you think? Could the BlackBerry PlayBook really be the iPad killer it purports to be?
