[melander]

Hello Blackberry forum!
A little background on myself. I've been a fan of thoughtful and practical GUIs since the days of GeOS, Win 3.0, Desqview X, and NextStep.
The last Blackberry device I used was a 857? Nice email platform, but I moved to the Palm Treo line since then and even use the HP WebOS now on their last candybar, the Palm Pixi.

Fast forward to Today. I had expected the HP Touchpad to bring good news to WebOS users but it looks like strike 2 out of 3 this year for their mobile department. You might expect that as a WebOS user, I would gain more by pairing the WebOS tablet with my WebOS device but since HP is abandoning the candybar platform in favor of sliders, I was freed to make a choice in tablets.

I tried:

The HP Touchpad - Love the UI, but gestures in the bezel area have been removed from the tablet that exist on WebOS phones. Has flash but not all flash sites are created the same and could not play a particular test site; teamcoco.com.

iPad - It has the market of apps, but no flash. Felt big. Task oriented UI

Galaxy and Transformer Android devices - horrible UI. Call it honeycomb, whatever, it's trash. They played my test site OK but lagged and hung.

Then I tried the Playbook: UI is familiar ( feels like WebOS) but it has bezel gestures, so the QNX tablet execution is done better. I "stumbled" upon the browser tabs, nice. It played the test site no problem while the Android devices, on the same LAN, were still hanging.


So I bought my Playbook the week after the HP Touchpad was released instead. I already knew there was no native PIM. But I don't need the Playbook to replace my OWA-synched phone for calendar and contacts.

As for email, it would be nice, I even sideloaded Amail. But for gmail and work mail on my notebook and desktops, I _always_ use webmail. My phone is the only device I use that uses a native email client. It is handy in that case to make the experience smoother without using small, barely clickable webmail links. The gmail device-based webmail is well done. OWA on 2003 is OK, but needs better scaling.

My colleague who praises his iPad could only think of native email as being missing on the Playbook. I reminded him that Apple just released iCloud and I gleefully noted that "my email is in the cloud"-- through webmail. I then noticed that because the browser is so well done, I could join video conferencing, listen to espn radio and other things without a need for a native application.

I like RIM's execution. I've now been thinking about a BB phone. But, if there will be a QNX version ever, I can wait to see what will come.

Thanks for listening!