Blackberry Playbook OS 2.0 Review

Blackberry PlayBook OS 2.0 Review

I've been using PlayBook OS 2.0 for just under a week now and so I decided that I wanted to sum up how my experience with the tablets new update has gone. Now this review will be of personal views and so it should help those who haven't decided to upgrade yet, whether they wish to do so. This review will be laid out in the form of the things that I have noticed most as a change in OS 2.0 to the things I have noticed least.

The first thing that I have noticed was the push notifications that have been enabled in the messaging application. I currently use an Android smart phone and do the majority of my emailing on this hand set, but I always felt it would be neat to have a more rich and in-depth emailing application. This is exactly what I got with the Messages application in OS 2.0; I have the ability to change font, font size, indents, text color, whether I wish to Bold or put the text into italics. I just found this all a very nice experience when composing and replying to emails. The push notifications are a breathe of fresh air, I love to be at college and go to lunch then come back and see the little red LED flashing or come out of the shower to see I have a Tweet. Even though at first the email application seemed slow and unresponsive, since then it appears to have righted itself and works nicely now; it could still do with a tiny speed upgrade though.

The contacts and calendar applications have also been a nice addition however I haven't found myself massively using them apart from to check if I have a life in the next couple of weeks or to see what a certain person's last Tweet or Facebook status was. I think I'd definitely benefit from these two applications more if I were a businessman or somebody who had a lot of appointments with lots of different people a month.

One of the other things I have noticed and loved in the Playbook OS 2.0 is the browser upgrade! Before the browser was brilliant, but I heavily depend on websites with flash on and so it resulted in the pages taking some time to load and then not rendering well and the scrolling being choppy. However now, almost every website I visit is flawless no matter how much flash is on the page and I have DEFINITELY recognised the upgraded speeds. Web browsing is a true delight now and I feel confident visiting any website in front of my friends and not having to worry about their iPad being more sturdy than the Playbook. One thing I did pick up on that was a massive annoyance actually was that the QWERTY Keyboard didn't work properly and resulted in me having to resort to a QWERTZ which messed with my head when typing; something that RIM definitely need to sort in an update.

I have downloaded a couple of Android applications from the Apple World, but the hype from RIM about the thousands of new apps doesn't feel quite right. The reason I say this is that yeah thousands may have come in, but we don't know about them and they aren't being advertised enough. The new Approach world shows off some features applications and I haven't seen one Android port in the featured as of yet. In addition, a lot of the games that come to the Playbook don't run superbly as we are used to smooth and beautiful animations and Android has never produced this.

Overall, I think the Playbook OS 2.0 upgrade has brought the Playbook onto the same level as the iPad in terms of OS. However, there needs to be more applications that are for productivity, yeah we have about twenty top class 3D gaming applications from the likes of EA and Gameloft, but there are so few productivity applications. I can barely find a good News Reader, GeeReader is the only RSS application that I can bare. I think the OS could also do with a few speed improvements and the keyboard bug needs to get fixed. However, I love the update because the Playbook now feels like a complete tablet and I am glad it was eventually released and they didn't give up on the tablet. Messages is really nice and now having push notifications will allow for third party applications to take advantage of this feature. Well done RIM!