I’ve used a BlackBerry smartphone for almost two years; it’s a Curve 8520, unfortunately cursed with only GPRS/EDGE network access, but remarkably sturdy and a very functional phone. As a communications device, it’s stellar: notifications are concentrated in one place, my emails are constantly pushed to me, and the flashing LED always keeps me informed as to whether I have any new mail. Essentially, I chose it because it was ridiculously useful when trying to keep on top of several email conversations; and beyond that, the integration with social networking tools like Facebook and Twitter was so tight that they felt like parts of the actual operating system, and they provided push notifications in much subtler way than competing smartphones of the time, certainly with more subtlety than the pop-ups in the contemporary version of iOS. As a fan of the BlackBerry smartphone, its bigger brother, the PlayBook, caught my attention when it was first formally announced.

Based on the QNX Neutrino operating system, and therefore built on a completely different software base than any of its smartphone siblings, the PlayBook seems to have been designed primarily as a complement to the BlackBerry smartphone. That’s not to say it isn’t a feasible option for anybody looking for a standalone tablet; it’s just that existing BlackBerry owners will likely appreciate it the most. BlackBerry Bridge is a built-in function of the operating system which allows seamless exchange of data between a PlayBook and a paired BlackBerry smartphone over Bluetooth, and while coming to grips with the device, I found myself often typing up messages to my friends and colleagues on the tablet, and then seeing them actually being sent from my phone. If you own a Bluetooth-enabled phone that is not a BlackBerry, you can still tether it to your phone to provide an Internet connection in the “Internet Tethering” section of the settings menu. You can even do this with a BlackBerry, but it doesn’t provide much of a bonus besides incurring additional charges and letting you use the regular browser to surf the web instead of the near-identical Bridge Browser.

There is no 3G- or 4G-enabled PlayBook on the market so far; it’s strictly Wi-Fi, and there’s no support for ad-hoc wireless networks as a security precaution. However, BlackBerry Bridge, a key feature of the device, offers a lot of connectivity bonuses besides Internet access: when a BlackBerry smartphone and PlayBook tablet are paired, eight new icons appear under the tablet’s “BlackBerry Bridge” panel, giving users the opportunity to browse the contacts, tasks, calendar, and memo pad from their phone on the larger display, as well as browse the web, read and send emails, and use BlackBerry Messenger. If you’re already a BlackBerry owner, owning a PlayBook is undeniably an enhancement. It makes browsing the web and viewing email attachments much more natural, while still using your phone’s existing data plan, and if you happen to find a Wi-Fi hotspot, you can take advantage of it to dive into the more PlayBook-exclusive functionality. There aren’t any native apps for mail and BBM as of yet, so it does make the tablet’s capabilities as a communication device fairly limited to BlackBerry smartphone owners right now, but the upcoming OS 2.0 software update promises to introduce them, and using the browser in the meantime is something of a working compromise. It means no push notifications for mail unless you’re using a third party app, but since users who aren’t using Bridge will need to be connected to Wi-Fi for mail anyway, this isn’t the real limiting factor.

Before I talk about any other aspect of the PlayBook, I want to talk about the user interface. Like most tablets, you can take the tablet into portrait or landscape mode as you see fit, and the screen re-arranges itself accordingly. Unlike most tablets though, the PlayBook’s hardware provides an intuitive and unique way of navigating, utilising touch-sensitive bezels at the side of the screen. The border around the screen is itself touch-sensitive; it detects when you’re swiping onto and off from the actual display, and reacts according. Swiping onto the display from the bottom bezel minimises the active app and brings you to the home screen, where you can see all your installed applications, as well as flick through the currently minimised applications, each of which has a live-updated thumbnail. You can configure applications to keep running while minimised, and you can watch videos play and the camera run while minimised. Swiping from the side bezels instantaneously switch to the previous or next minimised application, while a swipe at the top of the screen brings down a context-specific menu unique to the application, providing a consistent place for developers to place application navigation items. The browser, for example, takes advantage of the top swipe to bring down tab control, allowing users to see image thumbnails of each open tab, and easily access bookmarks and settings. It conserves space on the screen, and gives developers the space to make large, touch-friendly buttons without sacrificing the amount of content on the page. And don’t worry about accidents; the device can be held comfortably with no risk of accidentally making a bezel gesture.

The browser itself is a great achievement, probably coming as close to a desktop browsing experience as a tablet can get. HTML5- and CSS3-powered websites render perfectly, and support for Flash is built right into the browser. It works as smoothly as it does on a desktop; you can play embedded YouTube videos, Flash games, and generally enjoy an unadulterated version of the Internet. You can even download files that the PlayBook itself can’t open, letting you take advantage of wireless Internet hotspots to download large files on the go. Downloaded media files are automatically loaded into your media library, so you can instantly listen to MP3s, watch AVIs, or browse saved pictures without delay or issue; unlike RIM’s smartphones, though, you can’t download apps this way. You’re restricted to installing apps via App World, unless you use the app sideloading tools provided in the developer SDK, which the average consumer wouldn’t dare touch. It’s likely a security feature, but it’s worth noting that App World won’t work without a Wi-Fi connection, so you won’t be installing any applications through a tethered connection. The Bridge Browser, which browses the web using the network coverage of your paired BlackBerry smartphone without any additional fee over your existing data plan, seems to struggle more with downloads than the Wi-Fi enabled equivalent, as many “finish” prematurely and return corrupted result files, but since you’re unlikely to download huge files with a mobile connection, this isn’t really a dealbreaker.

The media applications, which really consist of Pictures, Music, and Videos, have gorgeous user interfaces, in particular the Music application, which allows users to organise their music library by song title, artist, album, or genre, and provides direct music controls in the Now Playing menu along the bottom of the screen. It automatically rearranges itself as the orientation changes to make the most of on-screen real estate, but in both, it’s a colourful and friendly interface for playing music. Disappointingly, the “Show what I’m listening to” option in smartphone versions of BlackBerry Messenger is absent from the Bridge version, so you won’t be advertising what you’re playing, but the PlayBook proves itself as a capable music player anyway. The video application is a little more simplistic, simply providing categories for “Downloaded videos” and “Recorded videos” and arranging their thumbnails in a tile layout, but the included sample video shows off an astonishing quality of playback on the device, smoothly running vivid 1080p HD video. Unfortunately, videos won’t save your position when they’re closed, so if you close a video before it’s over with the intent of finishing it later, you better note the timecode, because it’ll restart from the beginning. The lack of categorisation is also a little annoying; your videos are all displayed in one place, and if you’ve moved episodes of a television show onto your PlayBook, for example, then all the episodes will be displayed on the same page. The video application can easily be switched into “presentation mode” too, in which video is outputted through the micro-HDMI connector on the bottom of the tablet body.

Hardware wise, three media buttons adorn the top of the device next to the power button, allowing you to quickly control your open media player. These are a little off-centre though, with a tiny round power button shifting them to the side. The power button’s placement is a little unpleasant; it’s hard to find by touch and a little too close to the media buttons. BlackBerry smartphone owners will be accustomed to previous, play/pause, and next buttons at the top of their device, with volume buttons on the side; the PlayBook, on the other hand, provides only volume down, play/pause, and volume up as hardware buttons, but holding the volume buttons down for a second makes them behave like skip buttons instead. It’s less than preferable, but it gets the job done without covering the tablet’s body with unnecessary buttons. Less comfortably, the headphone port is located on the top of the device, rather than the bottom or perhaps the side. Its position permits listening to your PlayBook while it’s in the provided neoprene sleeve, but if the sleeve was the priority, it’s odd then that the charger/data port (the same standard microUSB port boasted by the phones) is inaccessible without putting the sleeve on upside down.

Whatever the PlayBook lacks in its body is by far displaced by the astounding amount of polish in the operating system. Being able to summon Wi-Fi and Bluetooth toggles at any time with two basic gestures stands testament to the fluidity of the operating system, and simple touches like tapping the home screen’s clock to instantly summon a calendar and alarm toggle without having to launch an application make for a very pleasant user experience. I encountered a couple of stability issues while trying more intense things, like apps crashing when I had too many things running in the background, or the browser crashing with too many tabs or JavaScript processes, but overall the operating system seems strongly built. Of course, a lot of what makes the operating system work so well is down to the hardware; the swipe gestures that we find so effective and appealing wouldn’t be possible without the tablet’s touch-sensitive bezels. The front face of the tablet has no buttons at all, and yet is more intuitive and user-friendly than most tablets which do. The battery life seems to be very reasonable, particularly when you’re turning off unused facilities like Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. I watched four hours of standard definition video with the screen brightness at a comfortable halfway point and barely brought the battery level down by 15%. I’m sure that intensive 3D applications and games are a little more power-hungry, but in a work application, it should easily support you through your entire working day without needing plugged in.

I was pleasantly surprised by the PlayBook’s keyboard; I’m generally not a fan of touch-screen keyboards, and I’ve successfully avoided touch-screen smartphones so far, but the large multitouch keyboard is remarkably easy to use. There are a couple of minor nuisances: the keys still display as lowercase when you’re about to type an automatic capital, which doesn’t seem right, and while the position of the key representing Shift and Caps Lock is in a similar position to where it would appear on a regular QWERTY keyboard, it has switched places with where the symbol key would appear on a BlackBerry smartphone keyboard. As a result, it’s easy to accidentally hit one instead of the other purely from habit. Having to hit the symbol key toggle to bring up commonly used punctuation like the apostrophe or question mark is also an inconvenience, essential requiring three keystrokes to get the job done: symbol, apostrophe, symbol. Many apps will automatically correct “cant” to “can’t” and so on, but the included word processor, Word to Go, is a notable exception and I can’t fathom why. One would hope that this will be patched later, but it doesn’t seem that an easy alternative could exist without completely redesigning the keyboard layout. Aside from these minor issues, the touch keyboard is a pleasant typing solution in both the landscape and portrait orientations; it could be improved, but as tablets go, it’s comfortable for quick, two-handed typing, as well as the one-finger jab.

Copy and paste support is also built into the operating system, but its performance seems to vary. In Word to Go, selecting and copying text is near flawless: you simply tap an area of text to make a blue marker appear, which can be moved to whichever point you want, and then released to open a context menu with options like “paste” and “select text”. Selecting text is as easy as moving two markers to encapsulate the desired section, then copying the text into the clipboard is as easy as releasing them and hitting “copy” or “cut”. The clipboard is system-wide, and while the ability to copy and paste between apps is somewhat taken for granted these days, it’s still a valid addition. Unfortunately, the text selection and copying functionality seems to suffer in some apps, and it’s nigh impossible to coax the selection markers into life on the BlackBerry Bridge “MemoPad” app. There are also some clashes with specific bits of software; Word to Go has a built-in spellchecker that underlines words it doesn’t believe to exist. It’s not entirely accurate, its dictionary can not be edited, and tapping an underlined word will summon a list of suggestions, instead of placing the marker. As a result, you can’t place a marker in an underlined word without placing it into adjacent text and then moving it; not a functional impairment, but an inconvenience.

I can’t attest to having ever had such a slick experience on any other tablet; there’s no comparison to how well integrated every application is, and the responsiveness and ease of use of the multitasking facility is unmatched. When you can immediately switch to the next app in the queue merely by swiping at the side of the screen, you know the developers have really caught onto what factor defines the quality of a multitasking engine: speed. Multitasking is all about productivity, and in that context, a series of time-consuming gestures and button clicks is counter-intuitive. As a business device, as a personal information manager, as a handheld web browser, and even as a media player, RIM have nailed it. This device is a real accomplishment, and arguably the first really impressive piece of hardware to have come from the BlackBerry manufacturer for a good few years now. There’s certainly room for improvement, but OS 2.0 is only four months away, and even in its current state, this is one of the most powerful and appealing tablets on the market. The only disappointment is that more people haven’t got their hands on one yet.