[RubberChicken76]

I've had my 64 GB PlayBook for nearly a year. Got a great deal on it. I use it every day regularly. Love the OS, can't wait to see PlayBook OS 3.0 (aka BlackBerry 10) on a phone. Find it very intuitive. Lots of my family and friends have them too. I even have a bunch of apps on it that I use daily :-)

My single biggest gripe with the PlayBook though is the freakin' browser. What's really maddening about it is that - unlike my old Curve or Bold - when it works, it actually works very well. When it works, it renders pretty quickly, pretty accurately and does a decent job replicating the desktop experience. You see the potential, unlike my old Curve which felt like the Browser was pretty useless.

However, it fails a lot. I wish RIM's Torch guys would pay attention to the little details. It crashes all the freakin time. Surf a forum ... crash. Watch a video. Crash. Watch youtube. Crash. But not consistently. The browser is the most unstable app on the device for me, yet such a critical one.

There are also times when it just fails to load a page and I don't know why. Usually, I try reloading and it works. Sometimes it doesn't. Again, no reason. Not sure if it's a RIM issue or a site issue, but it happens a fair bit.

Third gripe is the checkerboarding. I don't notice a big difference in rendering time relative to my iPhone, but the PlayBook does that annoying checkerboarding thing when it's rendering. Load a long page with lots of info and see the checkerboarding all over the place. It's really flaky.

I know RIM is spouting how well it does on HTML 5 tests and all, but hopefully they can also spout "rock solid, always loads, no checkerboarding" when BlackBerry 10 comes out.

Great device, but have to get that off my chest. RIM's QA testers need to do a better job here.

[teamfoster03]

I agree, I love my playbook and the browsers abilities, but the browser is very unstable at times. I wish the browser team took some notes from the phone browser. on my phone it tells me when its out of memory and tells me to close some tabs. on playbook it just crashes. its very inconsistent, sometimes pages work other times they crash. I also hate the bookmarks in the pb browser. really wish i could organize them or at least search. lets hope they fix all of this in BB10

Sent from my BlackBerry 9810 using Tapatalk

[dave_h_946]

I am not quite sure why you compare a phone's browser with the PB's browser but whenever I have problems with my PB's browser I just clear everything up (e.g. cache, cookies, etc) and it's back to normal. As for the checkerboard....well....there are tons of threads on this topic and everything boils down that it's something we have to live with, it's going to stay with us for a while. I don't know how the PB's browser compares to other OSs' browser cause never had the chance to use another OS but I personally am pretty happy with the native browser.

I don't want to sound like a broken record but I was wondering if by disabling java and flash, webpages still make your browser to crash.

[BlackStormRising]

It's quite possible that many of these glitches will disappear when the BB10 upgrade drops sometime in the new year. We may even get that upgrade for free! Purely conjecture on my part, but I'm banking on free OS upgrades for the life of the product I paid $500 for!

[tarektoverso]

Playbook browser is possessed by a daemon. I see no other explanations
.

[Sriman]

It's quite possible that many of these glitches will disappear when the BB10 upgrade drops sometime in the new year. We may even get that upgrade for free! Purely conjecture on my part, but I'm banking on free OS upgrades for the life of the product I paid $500 for!

what makes you think the upgrade to bb10 will not be free. if rim charges for the upgrade, it will be the last nail on their coffin....

[RubberChicken76]

When has RIM ever charged for a single software upgrade?

[kbz1960]

Java script is a big issue with the browser. They need to spend time on why but they won't because the bb10 browser isn't built off of air like the pb one is and the pb will get the new browser whenever so I imagine they'll spend no time trying to fix it but it better be fixed in bb10.

[howarmat]

It's quite possible that many of these glitches will disappear when the BB10 upgrade drops sometime in the new year. We may even get that upgrade for free! Purely conjecture on my part, but I'm banking on free OS upgrades for the life of the product I paid $500 for!

When has RIM ever charged for a single software upgrade?

it will be free...no one charges for OS upgrades in the mobile world. I dont know why some people think this.

[joshua_sx1]

Companies who are charging their customers for OS upgrade are those who are losing money, not getting profit from their products, wants to introduce something new but future and success are still uncertain and desperately needing every opportunity to make profit that even OS upgrade on their products will not be free...

Err, it may sound like RIM but I don't think they'll do it...

[dusdal]

Turn off javascript and flash. Then it will be smooth and fast, without the whole Internet being available.

[GreyGhostRos]

it will be free...no one charges for OS upgrades in the mobile world. I dont know why some people think this.

Maybe cos Apple charged for upgrades to their ipod touch for sometime.. Though anyone who was willing to take efforts could get their hands on the ipsw and manually flash it..
Maybe that makes people think that companies may charge for major upgrades..

[diegonei]

It looks like somebody really needs to wipe/debrick his device...

[howarmat]

Maybe cos Apple charged for upgrades to their ipod touch for sometime.. Though anyone who was willing to take efforts could get their hands on the ipsw and manually flash it..
Maybe that makes people think that companies may charge for major upgrades..

i guess that is true but i thought that they stopped with iOS 4 a couple years back.

[welshyyyyy]

Turning off javascript makes the browser fly. One of my fave sites is "thechive.com" (best website ever!) and with javascript on its so slow to load all the pictures on the pages you just give up as it's painful,like using the Internet on a dial up connection! Turn it off and it flies. The downside is having to turn it on when you want to watch some videos, YouTube etc then turn it off again when you just want to browse the net. But after a while you get to be a bit of an expert at it, thumb the settings drop down bit, javascript off, hit back ..takes about 2 seconds

[kill_9]

The BlackBerry PLayBook web browser is plagued by one flaw - the cache needs to be purged once in a while to return the web browser to good health. There should be an option to auto-purge the various caches whenever the web browser is closed by the user. If you want various websites available as soon as you launch the web browser, enable the remember open tabs option and/or bookmark the websites. Yes, bookmark functionality is a poor excuse on this tablet but at least it works.

[kill_9]

When has RIM ever charged for a single software upgrade?

Not in all the time I have used BlackBerry products. The only fee is the upfront purchase price or client access licenses if using their enterprise management software. With the transition to ActiveSync on BlackBerry 10 and BlackBerry Enterprise Server 10 I was hoping they would abandon any reliance upon Microsoft Windows for BlackBerry Desktop Software and more importantly for BlackBerry Enterprise Server 10. Leverage QNX!

[FF22]

Turning off javascript makes the browser fly. One of my fave sites is "thechive.com" (best website ever!) and with javascript on its so slow to load all the pictures on the pages you just give up as it's painful,like using the Internet on a dial up connection! Turn it off and it flies. The downside is having to turn it on when you want to watch some videos, YouTube etc then turn it off again when you just want to browse the net. But after a while you get to be a bit of an expert at it, thumb the settings drop down bit, javascript off, hit back ..takes about 2 seconds

That's one reason I use SimpleBrowser+ - I can set different settings for different tabs between sessions. So Tab1 is set with both Flash and Javascript off, while tab 2 has them both on. Occasionally I will follow a link in Tab1 that does not function due to the settings but generally if I know it will be Youtube or similar I will open tab2.

[Chrysalis1156]

Yeah I've taken to leaving JavaScript off until I need it as well. Makes browsing a pleasure.

[RubberChicken76]

Maybe cos Apple charged for upgrades to their ipod touch for sometime

I have one and iOS 5 and 6 went on it just fine ... and free.

Now the horrible lagginess they brought said iPod Touch is a whole other story.

[Snipperdo17]

I think it's because it wasn't written in native code or very good code anyways. I expect it to be redone for bb10. Crashes happen on everything but I agree they are bad on the playbook.

[dongeel]

PB's part time operation made me to check out the iPad Mini yesterday. It is nearly the same size as the PB yet screen is much larger not to mention its weight much much lighter. Made me want to get it on the spot. I had to calm myself down to think before acting so it might be next weekend before deciding what to do.

[rupam95]

It's not that bad.......













































That's what she said...

[AndreyLepher]

mine too ,By the way My browseer Keeps crashin as always since os 1 ,,,, i dont know why some plps says that in their never crash but i search in the web and saw a lot of plp claimin about browser crash ..

[tarektoverso]

I have one and iOS 5 and 6 went on it just fine ... and free.

Now the horrible lagginess they brought said iPod Touch is a whole other story.

I hear ya. I hate my iPod touch since the ios 6.0.0 upgrade.