Tablet Comparisons: Blackberry Playbook / Motorola Xoom.

My wedding aniversary is coming up. I got my gift from my wife a bit early; A Motorola Xoom tablet. PC World were selling it reduced by £170 to £329, so I suggested that my wife buy it for me before the offer ended. In return, I’ve bought her the Blackberry Playbook, which arrived yesterday. So here’s a short review for anyone looking to buy either of these tablets.

Let’s start with the Xoom: This is a 10 inch tablet which runs the Android 3 operating system, the first version of Android aimed specifically at tablets.
The OS is quite intuitive and easy to use, but does have a couple of annoyancies. Firstly, there are no close gadgets for most applications, and those that you can close are often still kept running in the background. The OS is supposed to take care of disposing of inactive applications, although this doesn’t always seem to work. Having said that, it can be handy at times; if you reopen the web browser, it opens in the same state as when it was closed as long as you haven’t switched off the tablet. That leads on to my second annoyance; The lack of a software shutdown option. The blackberry scores well on both these points.

The Playbook is a 7 inch tablet and as such is a bit more practical in that you stand a more realistic chance of squeezing the Playbook into a pocket than the Xoom. Pairing the Playbook with a blackberry mobile is a breaze. You simply run the setup on the Play book until it displays a 2d bar code, then run the blackberry bridge app on the phone and show the bar code to the phone’s camera. The bar code contains all the information needed to pair the two devices. An excellent innovation. Admittedly I haven’t paired my Xoom to an android phone yet so I cannot compare the experience.

Blackberry bridge allows the tablet to sychronise mail and contact with the paired phone. One limitation is that the Blackberrry Bridge applications are only available when the phone is connected. You can not access email on the tablet without the phone, even when the tablet has a wiifi connection.

While the Blackberry OS have both software shutdown and properly closes applications on shutdown it is much less customisable than Android. You can’t group application shortcuts by type. You are limited to dragging the more commonly used ones to your favorites ‘drawer’. With Android on the Xoom I can drag icons to anywhere on any of the five screens allowing me to organize my application shortcuts as I like. There is also a free application that allows me to group similar applications that can then be launched via a single icon for each group.

Android also supports widgets, applications that run on the desktop, such as clocks, calendars etc. The Blackberry does have clock and calendar apps, but not as desktop widgets.

While both OSes are functional, the Blackberry OS probably less so, despite some clever innovations. No one buys any computing device for the OS alone, we all want to run applications and it’s on this front that the Blackberry disappoints. Not in it’s capability, but in the available applications from Blackberry ‘App World’. While I can accept the quality over quantity argument (do we really need a choice of over a hundred fart apps in the android market app store?); I’m not convinced that this argument holds up in this case. Not only are there far fewer app in Blackberry app world, I’ve found that you have to pay for apps that would be free on other platforms.  The most annoying example I’ve found so far is the Chinese IME which allows the input of Chinese text. Included in Windows, included in Mac OS X, free in Linux, naturally, free in the Android market, but a paid app from the Blackberry app world. To be fair there are also occasions where the converse is true; The Docs to go application is pre installed on the tablet and allows both reading and editing of Word documents whereas on Android, the free version of Docs to go allows Word documents to be viewed, but if you want to edit them, you need to purchase the pro version.

Conclusion: The only compelling reason to buy a Playbook would seem to be if you already have a Blackberry phone, and while it may prove to be sufficient for my wifes needs (Once she’s shelled out for the IME), personally, I would be disappointed, especially having seen the Xoom which cost £70 less on which I’ve installed a host off applications, all useful to some degree (no fart apps!), all of which so far have been free.