[sam_b77]

So here's a Playbook story I wanted to share with the folks here.
I buy my cell phones etc from a local mom and pop store here in India as most Indians do due to the personal touch you get at these stores as compared to the large chains. In India majority of phone and tablet sales are through these stores instead of the large chains.
Back to the point, I had the PB brought over from America and the PB launch is still 3 days away, and I was talking to the owner about it. The owner had been invited to the PB dealer event in March and knew about its capabilities but the RIM rep there hadn't seen the PB. So he was asking about the functionality of the PB. I didn't have my PB at the time so I was just explaining the features when the Nokia rep came over. The Nokia rep refused to believe that tje PB could run NFS minimised while playing a high def video. The owner said he too had seen it do this, but the Nokia rep was all about the Galaxy Tab and the new Acer Iconia (already launched). I told him that I would get the PB when I visited him next time.
So today I went to the store again and made sure I was carrying the PB. Called the Nokia rep over and proceeded to give him a demo of the PB. The first thing he said when he held it was that the design is awesome.
Next I gave him the standard PB demo with NFS and hi-def video. This actually floored him. The store owner was smiling as he is a blackberry guy himself and had been invited to the PB launch party yesterday and knew the full capabilities.
Nest thing the Nokia rep did was fire up Sheets To Go and typed out a few figures and put a formula in another cell,and when the PB took that he was finally floored. He was like no other tablet does that. He said the other tabs have to work the formula by bringing up options menu. I dont know about other tabs.so I took his word for it.
After playing with the PB for ten minutes he asked me why it had "failed" in America and got such adverse reviews because he basically loved the device.
So I had had to explain how the Apple fanboi reviewers just trashed the PB in the initial days . He kind of got the message.
What I got from this experiment was that most people would love the PB if they went out and actually used the device, so word of mouth would be critical for this device.
Sorry for the long post, but I guess the PB owners here would have had similar experiences.