The Blackberry PlayBook has been discounted to $199. It isn’t a Black Friday special; that is the price going forward, you can find this tablet anywhere for $199.
Blackberry describes the device as the world’s first professional grade tablet on their website.
What does that mean exactly?
The Blackberry PlayBook is a portable computer with a touch screen that runs proprietary software, as opposed to Android. That is actually a good thing. Android devices have been a nightmare. Android is a mobile iteration of Linux, which was itself, a personal computing iteration of Unix. It is a good OS for those that like to figure things out. It is like a mechanics OS, it isn’t very user friendly, and if Linux is any indication, it never will be.
There is nothing “professional grade” about a tablet. A tablet will never be the mobile computing equivalent of a truck (GMC also advertises their trucks as “professional grade”). A tablet is a mere toy in the world of computing; a device that someone with a mainframe gave someone with a workstation gave someone with a personal computer gave to someone that knows absolutely nothing about computing.
You can do everything that you need to do on a tablet.
You do not want to do anything that you seriously, need to do, on a tablet.
If a tablet is your lifeline, expect for your boat to sink. Tablets are like the Titanic; it should never be your primary device, unless checking email, watching YouTube videos, and stalking people on Facebook is what your life consists of.
So far, tablets do not even do a good job of showing us videos on YouTube.
This is, in part, due to issues the mobile community is having with Adobe. To be totally fair, Adobe Flash does not work that well on personal computers and laptops, so I am not surprised to hear that Adobe is pulling their support for Flash from tablets and smartphones.
This means that the mobile community needs to learn how to reliably integrate h.264 and HTML 5 into tablets. Apple was able to do this before they sold their first iPad; everyone else that aspires to sell tablets might want to learn how to do this as well.
The PlayBook is discounted to $199 for a very good reason; it is the price point that Amazon and Barnes & Noble have competed at with their devices, and at $199, it is an easy decision to make.
When Apple created the market for tablets, everyone was willing to spend $500, and a few people were even willing to pay as much as $800 for the latest device. The party is over, and tablets have returned from their honeymoon; $199 is about all that these devices are truly worth, and that is what the majority of Americans are willing to pay.
The PlayBook has 1GB of RAM, and a 1 GHz processor, which is more than enough power for a tablet. This should be the norm going forward. There will be a few individuals that may find a use for 2 to 8 GB of RAM, but there isn’t anything that a tablet does that you should need that much memory.