Mother (elderly technophobe) states that PlayBook is better than iPad!
Yesterday I performed my quarterly filial duty and went to see my mother - the main task of the day was setting up her new 'remote control' Doro phone (Doros are really good phones for seniors, or those with limited hearing/vision/touch - and I can remotely manage this new one over the web, which should hopefully save me from having to perform highly frustrating telephone support activities)
After having manually entered about 50 contacts into a feature phone with no QWERTY keyboard (having to press the 'A' key three times to get a 'C' - ouch, that was a pain) and having spent another two hours teaching my mother how to use the new phone features (she wasn't very happy being told to practice stuff, until she realised that the camera can take photos and videos of her dogs.....!)
Mother then wanted to know about the houses I am currently investigating to buy/convert......
Out came the trusty PlayBook, using Bridge to my Q10 (a very poor 3G signal in the wilds of darkest Somerset - I had to have my arm stuck out of the window for most of the evening to get a signal), and I showed her the estate agent websites (multiple tabs), the mortgage & conversion costs spreadsheet, the Word document detailing the work potentially required at each property, some photos I had taken, (and 'Classic Words Plus' - as we are both Scrabble addicts)
After a couple of hours of reviewing floorplans and amending the word and excel documents re: potential work & costs for different properties (my mother historically did all the 'brains work' when she and my father used to buy, upgrade, and sell properties)....
My mother had got her head around how to use the PlayBook and was now competently switching between open applications, switching between tabs on the browser, pinching/zooming, copying and pasting, etc, etc (I was quite impressed by this, as it took her months to learn how to use all the features on her space-age washing machine)
Mother then said.....
"This is so much better than your sister's tablet, as you can keep all of the applications open at once, and don't have to press that stupid button - why can't your sister's tablet do this?!"
(having said this, I must admit that she does prefer the bigger screen on my sister's iPad - fair enough, as mother's near-eyesight is now pants....)
Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings elderly technophobes
This experience really did reinforce to me, how good the PlayBook (still) is, how badly RIM/BlackBerry screwed up launching/marketing this product, and how the Betamax/VHS scenario will continue to repeat itself (every time a company does not properly think through how they go about the launch of a new product)
Just thought I'd share.....