- BlackBerry PlayBook Capabilities Amply Demonstrated by TAT
RIM recently acquired Swedish design firm The Astonishing Tribe, and for Mobile World Congress 2011, they were put to work demonstrating just how awesome the BlackBerry PlayBook could be. We got a look at three apps TAT had cooked up for a demonstration at the Texas Instruments booth (since the PlayBook runs on an OMAP 4430 dual-core 1 GHz processor from TI).
The first app made use of the tablet’s HDMI-out to project the user interface onto the big screen (managed by one of the processor cores) while the PlayBook itself showed a simple cursor (handled by the second core). The TV would display a 3D-enabled media viewer, so you could toss on the dorky glasses and look at some video and pictures that would really pop. You might notice some of the UI elements have been recycled from their joint project with Synaptics and a few others called Fuze. The second app is a scapbook that lets you resize, rotate, and assemble pictures with a variety of extra graphics (like thought balloons). Sharing options are built right in, so you can send your glorious creations off to Facebook. Finally, there was a multi-carrousel multimedia management app called Frontrunner that looked freakin’ sweet. Like the scrapbook, the app could handle multiple touch inputs at once without breaking a sweat – 60 FPS all the way.Yeah, there’s an established set of interface paradigms that the BlackBerry installed base are used to, and the PlayBook as is will be comfortably familiar to anyone who has used a webOS device, but now’s the time more than ever to squirt out something original, and it looks like TAT could do that in their sleep. I wouldn’t be exaggerating by saying that this got me the most excited out of everything I saw at MWC 2011.Last edited by barrist; 02-17-11 at 11:32 AM.
02-17-11 10:35 AMLike 0 -
- Crucial_XtremeRetired ModeratorI've been telling you guys that the PlayBook is awesome. I said in another thread, "QNX/PlayBook is where it's at". And it is. There isn't anything HW or SW wise to complain about. The point of one of the videos is that you can run HDMI out to one screen all while doing something completely different on the tablet itself. That's true multi-tasking, and it does it well. Again, QNX is inherently fast and is going to emerge as one of if not the best operating system on the market. It's made perfect to multi-task & use SMP(Symetric Multi-Processing). Just wait until TAT gets further integrated into the mix.
Also, when QNX comes to HH's(currently in testing) it's going to rock. There is a dedicated TAT team working on just the HH side of QNX. RIM is coming back and coming back strong....02-17-11 01:47 PMLike 10 - I've been telling you guys that the PlayBook is awesome. I said in another thread, "QNX/PlayBook is where it's at". And it is. There isn't anything HW or SW wise to complain about. The point of one of the videos is that you can run HDMI out to one screen all while doing something completely different on the tablet itself. That's true multi-tasking, and it does it well. Again, QNX is inherently fast and is going to emerge as one of if not the best operating system on the market. Just wait until TAT gets further integrated into the mix.
Also, when QNX comes to HH's(currently in testing) it's going to rock. There is a dedicated TAT team working on just the HH side of QNX. RIM is coming back and coming back strong....02-17-11 01:49 PMLike 0 -
- I completely agree. The media player RIM has shown off so far has been pretty bland. The one TAT had their was awesome. Hopefully that'l show up on the playbook, if not at launch, as a software update later on.02-17-11 02:55 PMLike 0
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- It's definitely appworld.
Anyone else of two minds regarding flashy UI's? Maybe there is a reason TAT's designs arn't built into the OS and are just demos to show off what the playbook can do - maybe those UI's themselves suck up most if not all of the resources, slowing down the rest of the system. Maybe a plainer UI is intentional on RIM's part. Maybe the idea is to take the resources that a fancy UI would suck up and instead make them available for actual programs and use....
Posted from my CrackBerry at wapforums.crackberry.com02-17-11 03:08 PMLike 0 - More likely is the fact that TAT joined the team late, probably why the current UI looks more OS6-ish than TAT. I'm not saying the entire UI will look crazy-3d like but frontrunner looks like something they could definitely incorporate into the core apps rather than the bland media app that's shown now.02-17-11 03:13 PMLike 0
- It's definitely appworld.
Anyone else of two minds regarding flashy UI's? Maybe there is a reason TAT's designs arn't built into the OS and are just demos to show off what the playbook can do - maybe those UI's themselves suck up most if not all of the resources, slowing down the rest of the system. Maybe a plainer UI is intentional on RIM's part. Maybe the idea is to take the resources that a fancy UI would suck up and instead make them available for actual programs and use....
Posted from my CrackBerry at wapforums.crackberry.com02-17-11 03:13 PMLike 0 - Oh, I completly agree. I'm not arguing with you at all. I'm just wondering if these designs are simply too resource heavy for the current playbook, considering RIM's constant hyping of multitaking capabilities. Might be a little harder to play need for speed, surf the web, work in excel, and watch a video if the UI was that fancy concave design. Would also explain why they keep stressing that these are demos to show off what the playbook is capable off, and are not currently planned for public consumption.
I'm sure we will see more of their influence in the future as they iron out the kinks and the phones/tablets get more powerful/once the novelty of having all those things open at once wears off.
Posted from my CrackBerry at wapforums.crackberry.com02-17-11 03:31 PMLike 0
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