Yes, PlayBook Does Get BlackBerry 10 Update 90
judgecorp writes "Yesterday's BlackBerry 10 announcement did not mention the company's tablet, the Playbook, but users will be relieved to know it will get an update to BlackBerry 10. It's not a huge surprise, since BB10 is based on the PlayBook's QNX operating system, but PlayBook users may have been worried since the company did not even mention the struggling tablet in passing at the event." Hopefully the Playbook's camera is better than the one in the new BB10-based Z10 phone, the low-light performance of which Gizmodo describes as "four-years-ago crap."
Re: (Score:1)
I think all 5 Playbook users are probably "meh" just like the rest of the world.
Re: (Score:2)
No, trust me, I know 3 of those 5 users ... and they'll all be interested in hearing this.
Re: (Score:2)
And I know the other three. I've actually been quite impressed by the Playbook, I'm thinking of buying one myself.
Re: (Score:1)
Awesome, you'll be able to use the built-in calculator to your great benefit!
Re: (Score:3)
Awesome, you'll be able to use the built-in calculator to your great benefit!
Most people I know use tablets for email, web browsing and e-book reading while traveling. So not having 50,000 fart apps isn't really a big downside. And, from what I understand, they've made porting Android apps much easier in the new OS so there should be at least 5,000 fart apps soon.
Re: (Score:2)
Actually, I think he was pointing out that between us we know 6 out of 5 owners of the playbook.
I think it's meant to be a whoosh. ;-)
Re: (Score:2)
I have one and it is collecting dust since I picked up a Nexus 7. The hardware is good, it's just the OS that was crap. The youtube app which I use a lot had an annoying feature where the video would stop after 5 seconds if you had paused and resumed playing. The wireless networking was flakey. Confirmed this when I got the Nexus and had rock solid signal in my house. The video player doesn't have AC3 nor DTS support so I need to reencode everything. Nexus 7 with MX player has played everything I have throw
Re: (Score:2)
The only fault I have is that it is too heavy for what it is, but a) it is a 2-3 year old design; b) it's built quite tough.
One of the reasons I like them is because they seem far more robust than my Asus Transformer; particularly after seeing pictures of screens people claim to have broken just by picking them up or closing them on the keyboard dock.
Re: (Score:1)
Cant say about the other four but im ecstatic.
Re: (Score:2)
Wow, so this is what it's like to be in an exclusive club.
Reviewer is not a photographer (Score:1)
Hey Gizmodo, why is the Z10 picture not framed the same way as the other three phones? The soldier's head is halfway down the picture, as opposed to the top for the other three pictures. Maybe Mario Aguilar should learn to point cameras before he reviews them.
Re: (Score:1)
So what your saying is that he was "holding it wrong"? And exactly how would moving the shoot point up make the image brighter?
Re: (Score:2)
A Date would be nice? (Score:3)
Re: (Score:1)
Apps for all (Score:1)
Seriously - what is slashdot's agenda? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
The balance concept is a pretty good idea. Whether it will work in the real world remains to be seen, but it addresses BYOD problems quite nicely.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:1)
Yes. So can you name a single one of the "revolutionary" features?
Re: (Score:1)
The thing they call Timeshift picture taking. It's the best camera invention ever IMO.
Re: (Score:2)
Agreed, 'revolutionary' makes me envisage Ernesto Guevara with a scruffy beard and a beret. Nevertheless...
To be honest, the hardware looks rather mundane - borrowing none of the sleek lines that Samsung "stole" from Apple. ;-)
But amongst OS aficionados, QNX is the business - a real-time embedded kernel that supposedly would leave Linux/XNU in the dust on phones (whoops, is such a statement considered blasphemy in these parts?!) A revolution? probably not but providing souped up multi-tasking of Android ap
Re: (Score:2)
Actually the camera is shitty...
But the rest is really nice.
Re: (Score:1)
Or they can see bog standard specs and an OS that has basically cherry-picked and evolved features from others? Using QtQuick is cool, but not revolutionary in anyway. Nokia phones were already using that. It's definitely an improvement over their other latest offerings but nothing "revolutionary" about the OS or the Z10.
Re: (Score:2)
You don't need a quad core when you are running QNX to get same real-world performance as iOS or Android. Just guessing.
Re: (Score:2)
Id hardly call my IPhone5 snappy AC. It could use a Quad.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not trolling, the Iphone5 is not immune to slowdown. The point is my money is on BB10 requiring less CPU resources since QNX pretty much wrote the book on RTOS. Also I play hockey with their devs so maybe I am trolling a bit ;D
Next Iphone will likely use a dual CPU/quad core GPU, so its not difficult to see the BB10 doing just as much (if not more) with less when you consider the snapdragon dual core + adreno I assume that drives it.
Re: (Score:2)
It's also possible that just because a processor has more cores doesn't mean that it is faster.
Re: (Score:2)
Indeed, like any client GUI, an 'app' will only run faster to the extent that its logic is parallelized.
I thought a main benefit of multiple cores was potentially to achieve the same amount of work at lower clock speeds. i.e. by delegating background processes to the secondary/tertiary/quaternary cores, the OS can run with fewer battery-draining CPU spikes.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
QNX vs PalmOS, palm wins performance LOL?
Re:Seriously - what is slashdot's agenda? (Score:4, Insightful)
and they've done a decent job with the overall design (not the looks), the predictive text works by putting the word you might want above the next letter you type, so if you type "the" then it will put "they're" above the y key so you just swipe up from that key. without having to look elsewhere and context-switch your brain to see a list of possible words. Someone sat down and thought about that, and that attention to software engineering detail gets a big thumbs up from me.
Re:Seriously - what is slashdot's agenda? (Score:5, Insightful)
Overall BlackBerry have done quite a good job. They manage to have a distinct style, an OS with both familiarity and feature that set it apart both for home and office. As for the polish, the phone comes with loads of app (android port), complete line of accessories, and an OS that seems on par feature-wise with the competition. They also don't turn their back on their core market, the business,
I don't see how BB could have done a better launch, and if the phones deliver on the promises during the first round of reviews, they are in as best place as they could have been.
Obviously they have a loooong way to go and the odds are against them big time. But for the time being, well done BB engineers !
Re: (Score:2)
because it's all so-so?
who the fuck is saying that they the camera is good? it's only good if you're a bb fan and had your last phone bought 4 years ago and are comparing to that(and were a bb fan so you didn't have a n95..).
Re: (Score:1)
They have just released a great new product with a revolutionary interface
I suppose it's revolutionary for a company that once mocked the iPhone to now imitate it.
Re: (Score:2)
Anyone who has had to administer BES probably has hate for these stupid little devices. I know I do.
Re: (Score:2)
Are you seeing the same review as me? The crackberry review took shots on the lumia 920, iphone 5, z10 and samsung s3. Images on the z10 are the worst on every test out there.
The camera just sucks, and it proves megapixels don't mean squat.
Never mind that they removed push email support from non corporate accounts, don't have pull down notifications like every platform out there, and abysmal 1 day battery compared to previous versions.
Re: (Score:1)
I OWN a PlayBook and I don't think terribly highly of it. OK, it's not that bad, but I literally have nothing to do on it. There's just nothing to do on it that my Android phone doesn't do better (except for having a large screen).
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
The revamped OS IS the current PlayBook OS. There are only a few features new to the OS that the PlayBook didn't already have.
Re: (Score:2)
Slashdot does not sling FUD, users do. Every time a new iPhone comes out, Android users make fun of it, and vice versa.
The thing to remember about Slashdot is this is where the tribes collide. Most of the self-reinforcing opinions people share does not make sense. The valuable points get modded to the top, and the trolls mark themselves anonymous. It's not a bad thing to get bent out of shape about, some remarkable conversations emerge from the variety of opinions.
That said, I own an iPad, a Nexus 7, a Gala
Re: (Score:2)
Slashdot does not sling FUD, users do.
A user submitted a story that the playbook would be upgraded with the new BB10 OS. A slashdot editor (timothy) tacked on speculation about whether the playbook has a 'crappy' camera. There is no need to speculate about this. The playbook has been out for almost 2 years. If it even has a camera, the quality thereof is likely well known.
He also added "from the seriously-how-is-blackberry-compelling-nowadays? dept". This is a good question and one that deserved to be answered in the summary. There are a
and ars says (Score:5, Informative)
ArsTechnica [arstechnica.com] has a user comment (scroll down, its the 'editors pick') showing the problem with the camera:
I should also point out that the iPhone's applied far more contrast to the picture and, as a result, lost detail - look at the flat area of darkness in the trunk compared to the range of tones present in the pic from the BB. These are all post-processing problems, though, and (assuming both devices were on default settings) really just tell you that Apple's software is set to produce 'punchier' pictures out of the box as opposed to the lighter processing done by the BB, which ultimately retains more of the image.
so its not crap, it just doesn't aggressively sharpen everything like the iPhone does, so it appears less defined and misty. Its just appearance though, slap it through the same amount of software processing and you'll get the same result.
Anyway, they say the keyboard is excellent and can be used with 1 hand (or 1 thumb) which is a definite design win.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, but its a camera on a phone. Most users of a camera phone aren't going to go through the hassle of adjusting the sharpness of the pictures. Apple, in this case, chose the right thing to produce an image that the user wants, rather than simply trying to deliver the most information in the picture that can be extracted.
Now if we were talking about slr's then I'd want the blackberry's camera.
Re: (Score:2)
My wife should be pleased ... (Score:2)
She's been underwhelmed with her PlayBook and found it a little flaky, prone to losing its network, or locking up and needing a hard boot.
The last upgrade fixed the rather pathetic battery life, so maybe this will improve it even more.
I'm tired of the scowls from her since I'm the one who bought it for her. We know a couple of people with them, and they seem to have the same kind of results -- though, I certainly know people who say theirs are the most stable things ever. To us, it's failed to live up to
Re: (Score:2)
What did she do to deserve the punishment?
The camera sucks, so the platform is doomed? (Score:1)
Seriously, a full article about how sub-par a single feature is in a smartphone. Gizmodo has been overtly critical of Blackberry in the past, but that's just ridiculous.
Re: (Score:1)
QNX and BB10 (Score:3)
BB10 and the Playbook OS are both based on QNX which is also in 60% of all car infotainment units. Rock solid micro kernal OS that is also used in nuclear plants and medical devices. I have used my Playbook for over two years now and it has new crashed. Apps install without having to reboot. I think many people will be pleasantly surprised with how well BB10 and QNX just works. It also sets the stage for more integration between smartphones, tablets, and car systems.
As for the update to the Playbook, Crackberry.com says that a new version of the Bridge program is in Appworld now which means that the Playbook update to BB10 could be any day now.
Re: (Score:2)
Sorry, never crashed.
Gizmodo confusing exposure with IQ (Score:1)
Spreading FUD from Gizmodo (Score:1)
I have a playbook (Score:2)
And I had it before it outsold the Ipad 4 over the holiday period in the UK by a ratio of 4-1.
Since it had ver 2 and later updates, has a decent mail client onboard now - and its core apps (Music, Pics, Movies, Internet, E-reading) all work to a reasonable nice standard - its price is low, and you get 64 GB so don't have such a need for storage - all on what might be termed awesome pricing.
I think Mx Player on droid plays more, but cut to the chase, the core movie player played everything I threw at it, and
Just hoping... (Score:2)
My Playbook now does exactly what I want it to do. It's a great remote terminal for my Linux box and a great tablet. I sincerely hope that upgrading to 10 will have no impact on this.
Incidentally, Playbooks, refurbished, have reached the "fun toy" price. Seriously, cheaper than the Kindle Fire I got Christmas 2011, and way ahead of it specs wise.
Oh, and the Playbook's cameras?
"PlayBook Features a 3 MP front-facing camera for video chatting over Wi-Fi and a rear-facing 5 MP camera, both of which can recor
Why does PlayBook take so -long- to boot-up?!? (Score:2)
...And, will boot-time improve when it's updated to BackBerry 10...? :-)
Will it be easier to insall & find KhanAcademy (Score:2)
A 64GB PlayBook w/ S/W updated to 2.1 would play most or even all of the Creative Common licensed files comprising the available portions of KhanAcademy.org, but it wasn't easy to find & go through a sequence of course files.
(There's a PlayBook-specific app for KA courses, but it sorted files of KA's courses rather poorly, IMO; at least it could play both Flash & MP4 format files just fine.)
I hope the BlackBerry 10 updated PlayBook can leave such course files where ever we decide to place them, ie,