I was happy to see the RIM acquisition of QNX bear fruit so early (I've always been a big fan of QNX).
I get the impression from the keynote that as the plan is to tune a JVM for performance working on top of QNX, that the longterm plan for the phones is to also migrate to QNX. (The tablet provides a good means to test this out, and get it working before migrating the phones)
This is one benefit to the virtual-machine based phones, if something better comes along in the underlying OS, you can migrate apps easier.
Companies should really learn from Apple. When you announce a new product; have it ready to ship within in the month. Every single alternative tablet I have seen is coming Qx 2011. I don't want to wait for an alternative - i want it now.
When you announce a new product; have it ready to ship within in the month (sic)
In martial arts they have this thing they call "telegraphing" a blow, where you unwittingly give your opponent plenty of notice of what's coming so that they can be ready to counter it.
Obviously RIM is so confident of their manufacturing and marketing prowess that they don't mind giving Apple 3-6 months notice of what they plan to ship.
On another subject, why is RIM even in this business? Are Apple iPads taking market share away from Blackberrys? Is iPad some kind of a threat to RIM? I would have guessed that RIM would be pouring all of its efforts into defending its corporate phone turf, not thinning their forces by launching new devices.
Agreed. I think this is a way to make some money and work out the kinks of QNX-as-a-phone-OS.
Also, if this thing was 3G in addition to wifi, a lot of people would ditch their BBs in favour a PlayBook. As it is, I can't see this generation being a big hit. Kind of hope it is though.
"Obviously RIM is so confident of their manufacturing and marketing prowess that they don't mind giving Apple 3-6 months notice of what they plan to ship."
Really? To me it reeks of "don't forget about us". They are telegraphing not because they are so confident in their punch but because they don't want people to forget they are in the fight.
I apologise for being a little sarcastic. However, "Don't forget about us" is only useful if their customers, especially their "enterprise" customers, are about to standardize on iPads and can be persuaded to hold off on the basis of PR stunt.
It's not obvious to me that consumers interested in buying an iPad for back-to-school or during the holiday season will hold up their purchases to see what RIM actually ships and how much it costs.
RIM really has nothing to lose -- they're not going to get this tablet out in time for Christmas 2010 so they might as well announce it now. They have little to gain in saying nothing until they launch because they're going to launch too late.
That's how it appears, but I think it's a misleading view
I think this is where we're going to see companies OS decisions come into play in the next few years; iOS is (very loosely) a subset of OSX, but with a phone UI. There's loads of potential here for it to grow. I don't know much about Android, but I think it's similar.
Two reasons for this, that I can see. To take mind share away from Apple, so they do not get too big before anyone else has a chance, and to signal that they are actually doing something.
Tablets take a while, to design, get software going, and source parts for those big screens. Everyone is running behind, and running scared. They are not taking as long as they did to respond to the iPhone.
One thing it is going to come down to is the software, which all of these new entrants seem ignorant of. You can come up with any hardware stats you want, nobody cares about that. Sure, a camera can be useful, but the rest, who cares.
It's a bit different - Apple had the advantage of being the first on the market. They could afford to take some time before shipping the devices. Everyone else has to play catchup now; the longer they wait, the stronger the iPad becomes.
Apple does however release most of their products shortly after they are announced (new ipad nano, apple tv, iphone4)
It really depends where you're at in the market. Apple and Google are on the attack and RIM is nervously awaiting the siege. If they can't ship they need to at least rally the troops and preach to the faithful. I'm guessing RIM did enough market research to understand that there is a major risk of users/developers jumping ship even in the next 6 months.
Alternatively, RIM are perfectly secure in their castle - there's little sign of any movement in their core corporate market to alternate devices. No need for them to panic, they want to do this right.
When I commute to work in the morning, and they announce the train is delayed (again!) out come 500 BlackBerries... It's quite a sight!
It's interesting to see how everyone tries to copy Apple's success without getting the point.
What made the Ipad (and the Iphone and the Ipod) a success was the fact that Apple created a new category that didn't exist before and marketed the hell out of it. All the me-too products make the fatal mistake of trying to make a product that's better than Apple's in the category that Apple invented and owns.
No matter how hard you try to make a product that's an Ipad-killer you'll never succeed because it's not an Ipad. It's like the cheap knock-offs of brand names - the chinese Konferse shoes might look like Converse, they might be cheaper and they might even be better but nobody will buy them because they aren't the original Converse.
If you want to own a niche you have to innovate your way there. You can't out-ipad and ipad. One of the commenters in the article even called it a palmpad.
I remember an interview with Jonathan Ive (Apple's chief designer) where he was asked what he would make if he was given the task of creating a phone for another company. His answer was "I don't know, but I do know that it would be nothing like the Iphone"
I disagree. You seem to imply the iPad is more a fashion statement than a useful device. But for many people it's both. If another tablet comes along that is more useful than the iPad, a sizable number of people will switch. Just look at iPhone and Android. No one who owns an Android phone is going to try and pretend it is fashionable or as sexy as the iPhone, but since that's not the only purpose of the device, they have succeeded anyway.
I didn't mean to imply that the Ipad is a fashion statement, my point was that whenever someone comes up with a X-killer they've usually already lost. For example, I think that Diaspora will never take off because they've positioned themselves as a facebook-killer. What happens is that a user who switches from facebook will look at disapora and say "what? How can this be a facebook killer? It doesn't even have (whatever feature of facebook). it's terrible market positioning.
the android/iphone example is a good one, but I don't think Android tries to be an iphone killer. It's a phone with it's own values. It's about choice and open-source, whereas the Iphone is about closed-source, proprietary code and a closed ecosystem. This is probebly a major reason why Android is taking marketshares. Google has different values than Apple, and it shows in Android. It has a different soul.
> whenever someone comes up with a X-killer they've usually already lost.
You mean like an Altavista killer, MySpace killer, or Blockbuster killer? Companies fail. Just because Apple is hot right now does not mean that it is immune to this fact. It probably won't happen six months after the ipad's release, but like everything else, something new will take its place.
There's a big difference between creating a product with the purpose of killing another product, and creating a product with the purpose of being better than another product.
Google wasn't an attempt to cash in on any kind of "search engine market", it was an attempt to remedy one of the biggest weaknesses of contemporary search engines: how to usefully rank a now-sufficient number of results.
Facebook wasn't intended to kill MySpace - it was intended to be better for a certain category of potential MySpace users: students. Initially, it was only marketed and available to them, and it was only after it had completely taken over that market that it was able to start seriously taking on MySpace.
Netflix could be said to have been aimed squarely at Blockbuster, but it's major tradeoffs of long wait times and a subscription model versus Blockbuster's same-day service and pay-as-you-go model made Netflix risky enough that nobody could have reasonably stated at the beginning that it stood a good chance of completely killing blockbuster so quickly.
Besides, none of the x-killers we see coming out these days are ever as drastically different as netflix was from Blockbuster; they're usually cheap knockoffs or more expensive versions afflicted by feature creep.
I am currently at the BlackBerry DevCon, and have to tell you that RIM is definitely not positioning the PlayBook (so-so name imo) as an iPad killer. They are after a whole new segment of applications here that seems to be envisioned to come off QNX distributed capabilities.
It's very early stages still, but think along the lines of manipulating your BlackBerry's email from the PlayBook over bluetooth or piping a powerpoint presentation to a projector over WiFi.Just completely random examples here, but I think they definitely have the professional/business segment in mind.
I think the analogy between the cheap Chinese knockoff and RIM falls apart in that RIM is a giant corporation that has years of smart phone development.
Apple wasn't the first company with a tablet, they just did it the best. There's nothing saying RIM couldn't beat iPad.
It's not about company size - it's about vision. If you look at the Ipad and the tablets that came before it it's pretty obvious that it's another category. There's a vision with the Ipad that wasn't there before. It just works. The problem with the RIM tablet is that it looks just like an Ipad, it seems to me like the management of RIM has looked at the Ipad and said "hey what's going on here, they're going to steal our marketshare. Let's make one just like it." I just don't think that kind of strategy works. Copying a product without intimately understanding why it was designed the way it was just isn't a good strategy.
There's also focus. Apple has always focused on the consumer. At best, the "prosumer," which is a nice way to say a consumer with a bigger budget. They've never made the needs of larger businesses their priority -- even when they're doing the necessary work: for example, when they introduced things like Apple Remote Desktop, they talked about it in terms of school computer labs.
RIM is primarily focused on the business side. The tablet, in this form factor, can fit into a purse or (har har) folio pretty easily. It talks to the blackberry their customers will already have. It's a way to extend the platform with a bigger screen, for Word documents, spreadsheets, etc, without losing the point of their brand.
Apple -- and bless them for it -- pushes the bar up across the board for user interfaces, usable power (as far as I can remember, other smartphones as powerful as the iPhone had terrible battery life), stability (remember windows mobile, and garnett), and pure capability (HDR photos). But, they've chosen to focus their energies on an intentionally-narrow set of products. There's plenty of space in the market for them, Android, and RIM. Apple's got the core consumer experience down pat. Android's got the variety and hardware development pace. RIM's got messaging.
Maybe Meego too, but that's probably just my silly wishing ;-) Why don't more Linux-based smartphone platforms come with an X server? :-(
Apple created the first (affordable) personal computer with a GUI interface and a mouse, too. Just because Apple created a new category doesn't mean they own that category. By your argument, the entire PC industry as we know it shouldn't exist.
I, for one, think the iPad is a little too limited for taste and I'm waiting for some other company to produce an reasonable alternative.
Well, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Back in the early days of the iPod's success, company after company came out with iPod-killers that all basically flopped. Then, after the iPhone became a hit, everyone touted new smartphones as iPhone killers, which also flopped. Android is the only thing which has every reached the status of a legitimate iKiller. The Android tablet or some descendent of it might be your best bet for finding the tablet you're looking for.
I'm not really sure, maybe Gartner has some vague reports on that.
RIM does make money on the use of their Business Enterprise Servers (BES), so in corporate installations they're taking in large sums of money on a per-year basis. Given that, and my assumption of Apple's superior profit per-unit, it might be hard to tell who makes more money on their phones overall.
was Apple making more profit on Macs than IBM did on PCs? I bet they did. But that didn't stop them from going almost bankrupt when that war was happening.
The iPod was an MP3-player killer. And the iPhone was a smartphone killer. In neither of those situations did Apple create the market -- they improved what other players were doing. Outside of Android, there were no new smartphone designs to tout as iPhone killers. My WinMo phone's underlying design predates the original iPhone by a long time even though the device itself is newer. Microsoft is finally getting around to making their iPhone killer with Windows Mobile 7.
I realize you're being clever by substituting the original poster's argument, but RIM did indeed create a new category.
When the Blackberry shipped, it wasn't a smartphone. It wasn't a phone at all. It was a dedicated email device. And it was pretty much alone in that category.
It became popular in businesses that had previously been using pagers (specifically 2-way pagers), and eventually they added a phone component (which was actually terrible for the first few iterations).
Atari's greatest hit the 2600 was never equalled, but they never managed to create a successor for the product. Maybe because they fired Nolan Bushnell, or maybe because of the leadership of Warner. so I don't think anyone out-ataried the atari - they just stagnated and died.
And the Newton was never a success, so there wasn't really much to out-newton. It was too far ahead of it's time, and the technology wasn't quite there yet.
1. Your observations about Atari and Newton highlight one of the problems with your initial argument- it's not generally a safe bet to assume an early category-creating product will continue to innovate and develop to stay at the front of the pack.
2. Whether RIM creates a broadly superior product is beside the point. A new market has opened up, and they expect it should be profitable if they can capture just a small share of that market.
Apple has shown a commitment to develop their successful product lines; but as the size of the market grows there will be plenty of room for profitable competitors even if Apple is wildly successful.
The category existed long before (take a look at, e.g., win ce-based tablets/pads that were released from 2000 on). They were the first though that used an OS that is truly optimized for a capacitive touch screen (those pads had resistive screens that weren't all that useful).
Stopped reading after you tried to insinuate that Apple invented the Portable MP3 Player, Smartphone, and Tablet PC market categories. What they did was enter existing and established markets, make an Apple-branded product with a good UI/UX design, and marketed the hell out of it.
A lot of people here are referring to the iPad as a tablet computer, but I think that most consumers and Apple do not think of the iPad as a tablet, slate, or other terms that imply computer. It's an appliance. Apple doesn't highlight or easily make available the typical computer specs like RAM, chip speed, etc. You buy an iPad and you know the software will just work. You don't have to worry about if your iPad can run X program or Y program, etc. Any stress that most people associate with computers aren't even concerns with the iPad.
What surprises me about the PlayBook is that BB can't seem to make up it's mind about how it's marketing the product. They pretty clearly emulate the iPad in that the web, Flash, etc. just work, but at the same time they highlight specs that mark it clearly as a computer. These specs really don't matter when competing with Apple, because only a very smaller portion of the market would even consider the specs when choosing between the iPad and the BB. Even the name can't make up it's mind; Book really labels it as a computer, but Play makes it seem otherwise. I sort of assumed that BB would be targeting mainly enterprise customers at first with their tablet, but naming it Play really conflicts with even that strategy.
In short, the product seems like design by committee and I think it's identity crisis will be a problem for it.
I would expect the new iPad no later than Q2 2011. The current generation was announced in January and available in April. I see no reason why Apple shouldn’t update the iPad yearly – just like the iPhone and their iPods.
If they do announce in Jan and ship in April (probably quicker this time), then Blackberry might not look as good in comparison. I really don't get why you would tip off your competition unless they are counting on a lot of companies doing budgeting for this new device.
Well, I’m not sure how much Apple could or would want to change the next iPad at this point in time. At any rate, 2011 will be an exciting year for tablets.
They will probably add the front facing camera and probably the next generation of A4 to keep up with the summer iPhone / fall iPod touch.
If they go the iPod evolution route, I expect to see a price drop to put more pressure on the low-end. I still dream of a dock / network sync that will allow people not to have to own another computer.
Logistically, it seems extremely unlikely that a new version of the iPad would be introduced in time for the holidays. It's only been 5 months since launch, after all, and they would have already had to be building them to be ready in time for the holidays. Ramping up production in April to catch up with supply, while simultaneously preparing the next model for production just a few months later? Madness!
The UI looks very impressive from the video. Very slick and fluid, the multitasking animation in particular is lovely.
Will be interesting if this is the real UI or not - it might just be a mockup like that infamous Nokia N97 promotional video vs the terrible reality: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1231464
They don't show a physical product in the mockup. I suspect you're right - we won't know for certain until someone does a hands on. In particular, I'm skeptical of Flash's performance, unless they've done some neat HW acceleration.
Well, this is the first non-iPad tablet that I find remotely compelling. If this thing doesn't require a carrier to be useful and affordable then it has a chance.
Why? Do not see anything special about this compared with the Samsung, or any other tablets that are coming out? It will come down to the software, and damn do I hate blackberry OS (not played with 6 yet). I look forward to having everything displayed as lists.
They mentioned that it would pair with your blackberry, and therefore share your data connection.
I'd be willing to bet that it won't pair with non-blackberry's (although maybe they'll surprise me), but if you have a BB (like a large number of people do) this should be a good companion device.
As to price, they didn't mention that or availability; which I suspect is bad news on both fronts. They're really pitching this to enterprises, so I'm guessing affordability isn't their primary bullet point.
Do you not find the Adam Tablet compelling? It's going to have the NVidia Pixel Qi screen that can go greyscale so you can see it in the sun, and runs Android.
I'm not convinced 7" displays are the right size for tablets. Using the iPad 9-10" feels right to me. That might just be experience bias but I don't really see any advantages of going smaller. Might as well just get one of the bigger SmartPhones at that point. If anything I think the future of tablets might be larger -- not smaller. I would love to have a 13 or 15" iPad.
I agree. I think it's silly that RIM says their playbook will be 7", but cost the same as an ipad.
Smaller, but not cheaper? I'm not sure that's going to make things easier for the poor salespeople in the shops trying to sell these.
I don't see what's business-y about this thing at all. Press photos show Videos, Photos, Music apps. In the FaceTime-like app, it is a dad chatting to a baby.
Just saying.
I presume hackers will love the dual-core goodness (I wouldn't mind experimenting with Clojure on it).
Wonder what their development environment is like and how good the UI kit is.
All the major players with a mobility presence realize they have to have a tablet in this game for their channel. HP, RIM, Dell - hell, even Cisco has a tablet:
I don't think Cisco/RIM are that interested in the consumer space (initially) - my guess is they have ceded the first couple years to Apple, and will start with the Business Vertical - an area that Apple seemingly has fairly low interest in pursuing seriously (to date - They succeed in valley companies, where 80% of the laptops in meetings I go to are Mac Book Pros, despite themselves. I mean, seriously - how difficult is it to get enterprise on-site support...)
I think I'd still rather have a Notion Ink Adam (http://blog.laptopmag.com/hands-on-with-notion-ink-adam-prot...). It's supposed to be coming out Q4 this year, and has a pixelQi screen (combines the best qualities of e-ink and LCD). iPad like price and form factor, runs android, what's not to like?
But then again I already have a Nexus One, so I've clearly drunk the Android kool-aid.
BlackBerry's typically have incredible battery life - far beyond that of any other smartphone I've used. Obviously this is a whole new kind of beast, with regards to both software and hardware. However, I'm confident (optimistic?) that RIM will have stuck to their legacy of excellent battery life with this latest offering.
Problem is that they've got a CPU that is (reportedly) twice as quick as what's in the iPad, more RAM... and 0.5 lbs less weight.
As we've seen from the iPad teardowns, the vast majority of the iPad's mass is the massive battery. 0.5 lbs seems like it's a lot to rob from a battery while increasing the power consumption of the device.
This is just bullshit. The reason BlackBerrys have decent battery life is because they run underpowered CPUs and OSes that do almost nothing.
This thing is completely different, running a dual core A9 and driving a high res screen on a new OS. It's going to chew through battery like crazy. Guaranteed.
The reason BlackBerries have decent battery life is the RIM back-end - they had true push email long before anyone else. So BBs don't have to poll the network, wasting power on a 3G connection.
Not surprising there's no mention of battery life. Battery life is very dependent on software, which they'll be tweaking for months before the release.
I really hope they actually do something with the platform that allows it to live up to its name, "PlayBook". I hope they didn't just name it that because they liked the sound or the metaphor at face value.
Think about it. Enterprise types are very competitive and sports fans; so the idea of carrying around your work "playbook" suddenly becomes very cool. I understand that the mix of calendar / email / and web make this the case for any device but I'm still waiting for someone to push the bar forward in this area specifically.
I'm a huge iPad fan but I'm still waiting on a developer to do something that takes all the different content buckets (GTD apps, email, Dropbox, Basecamp, Yammer, CRM, etc) and create an interface that allows them to work well together and with others (be it people on your team, company wide, or maybe just your family and friends). I'd really like to see someone do what FlipBoard did for RSS feeds and social feeds on the iPad but for being busy at work, in and out of meetings, on the go, etc.
The name "PlayBook" really hits home for me there but I have a hunch that it's just a name and nothing more.
Based on specs alone and QNX's track record, this seems to be a credible competitor to the iPad. At least much better than the HP slate running on Windows 7.
Going through the Blackberry site, it isn't clear how apps are developed for the Playbook. One page mentions web development using the HTML5 stack and Adobe Flash. Perhaps the apps are developed as a bundled runtime on top of Flash?
They talked up the POSIX environment and OpenGL, as well as a JVM for classic BlackBerry compatibility. But for now it appears the only dev kits available are HTML5 and Flash, which isn't surprising.
Like Apple and iOS, RIM will need to finish writing v1.0 of their own native apps before they will have a good idea of what the public APIs should be. And it remains to be seen just what that native API will resemble, what language(s) it will support, how good the documentation is, etc. Those things just don't fall from the sky. On the other hand, RIM has lots of experience in that area.
RIM needs to fix the Storm and Torch before they even try to attack the tablet market. Those two products don't give me much confidence in this new one, although the Playbook is based on a different OS: QNX instead of BB.
As for the Playbook, too much fake pre-rendered animations, not enough actual video of the tablet.
one of the tagline descriptors from the video: "Flash-loving"
Interesting they highlight that in their first marketing video. I suppose with these things it can be difficult to differentiate device capabilities that consumers can actually comprehend (as opposed to just tech spec stats). I still wonder to what extent people actually know whether or not they care about having flash capabilities on their mobile devices.
If they're going to compete with Apple, they need to work on their presentation and connection with the consumer. The guy in the pinstripe suit and tie is simply no comparison to having a passionate Steve Jobs in jeans up there on stage walking you through it live like you're sitting at a desk with him.
Seems like a pretty good product if it launched now, but Apple will soon announce the next iPad which will likely leave many of the PlayBook's distinguishing features in the dust.
I understand the metaphor but it seems a bit of stretch.
Since when do sports remind you of a product built for the enterprise? Considering the device can do more than just plan out strategies (as a playbook does), the name doesn't seem right.
I get the impression from the keynote that as the plan is to tune a JVM for performance working on top of QNX, that the longterm plan for the phones is to also migrate to QNX. (The tablet provides a good means to test this out, and get it working before migrating the phones)
This is one benefit to the virtual-machine based phones, if something better comes along in the underlying OS, you can migrate apps easier.