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Thoughts on the updated PlayBook 2.0

In February, Research in Motion's much anticipated update to the BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0 was released.  I have had my PlayBook for a few months prior to that and wanted to put down some thoughts I had on the update and what is still lacking.

First, the keyboard. The Swiftkey powered keyboard's auto-suggest interface is a lot better than the previous iteration of the keyboard. It isn't quite the phone's keyboard yet, but I do find the full word suggestions (including non-standard words like my name) to be useful. I find it annoying that not every app uses it though, but that may be because developers didn't know they could. I am hoping they fix that.

Startup time has gone up dramatically. I typically turn off my tablet as I hate fishing for the charger. I haven't measured this to mark out the differences in time, but I noticed that starting up from a full shutdown take a LOT longer than it previously used to. I am not so thrilled about this regression, but can live with it.

The messaging application which has the unified inbox is quite useful. Again, it isn't quite the phone's inbox, but I can live with having email. I don't particularly find myself typing long emails on the tablet; I still much prefer the physical keyboard on the phone. The contacts application that is part of the mail/calendar etc update is useful, though I had to do a bunch of reconciliations for duplicate contacts. There is a merge function to link all the multiple contacts (from facebook/twitter/email accounts) but I found that I had to do a lot of clicking on the screen. It is usable, and not something I'd ever want to do again, but I think this one could have been made simpler (especially given that my phone has the same contacts and syncs to google via google sync). It also munged up a lot of names, changing the first name to the nickname field somehow, making me wish I had a proper keyboard and mouse to work the darn thing.

The browser didn't seem like it changed much, but I think internally, it has. I really, really wish it had a plugin framework, or at the very least, Adblock Plus type ad filtering. One of the evils that people have used flash for is those horribly garish ads that seem to be everywhere. All my computers have Firefox on it with Adblock Plus running on them and I don't see any ads. Frankly, I don't know why anyone would want to run their browser without it. But when you go from no ads to the browser on the PlayBook, you are inundated with these stupid flash based ads that trigger a new tab even if you go close to it by accident. Including the ones in-video. I find those to be the worst of the lot. Any time I watch a video, I try and watch it in fullscreen mode. And when I try to do that, I manage to trigger the ad and it pops up a new browser tab and doesn't fullscreen the video I was trying to watch. After some cursing, I get back to the tab where my video is running and try again. Honestly, I am not saying advertising doesn't have a place, I just don't see the point of it. I don't mind watching the odd add (and the CBC video player has a few of them embedded in some of their programming), but going away from fullscreen AND opening another tab to a page I will not pay attention to is not worth it for me.

On a side note, I don't really care for web-based advertising. I buy things online, but usually because I am looking for something or because I see a sale that is on. I am sure different people react differently to advertisements, but honestly, I don't like them and won't look at any windows they open. They are just annoyances.

I tried the Dolphin Android browser to see if it was any better, but gave up on that. It sucked for me. Yes, sucked is a technical term. 

BlackBerry bridge has improved a lot. I really like the remote feature of the phone/tablet combo where I can sit on my couch, with the PlayBook plugged into the TV and control it remotely. It isn't perfect, but it is mighty cool. I only wish I had a newer phone than the Tour, because scrolling with the little pearl is an exercise in futility. It is slow, doesn't do things like sideways swipes etc. Sigh. I might have to buy a new phone this year if I want to change this. I have to say, I absolutely LOVE this feature though. The idea is brilliant and it works well (had I better hardware). The one thing that freaks me out is the plain text nature of passwords when you type it on the PlayBook. I mean, it is my phone and no one else can see it, but I still find it odd that my passwords, when typed on the phone are not starred out like regular passwords are, when directly typed into an app/browser on the phone.

What else is new? Oh the podcast app got updated to take RSS feeds now. Thank goodness, because whatever service that the PlayBook uses, does not have any of the podcasts that I care about (primarily the CBC). And the app is still slow as molasses. I actually cringe when I use that app. I have to click on it and let the background loading take its sweet time. I don't know if its because it is trying to update every podcast I am subscribed to, or if something else makes it slow, but I do not enjoy using that app (despite the change in background colour to a more appealing green). 

I am sure there are many other things out there that have improved and changed, but this has been a long overdue post, so I'll go ahead and post it. 


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