A New Home - The BlackBerry PlayBook Review

A New Home

Like many things, when talking about home screens there's a spectrum of options. On the simplest end we've got Apple with iOS, and for the ultimate in complexity there's a full blown desktop OS like Windows or OS X. In between there's Android and somewhere between iOS and Android we have the PlayBook OS.

The default home screen is your typical grid of apps. You can collapse the grid down to a single row of six icons in landscape mode, or view the full grid. RIM provides five tabs to help sort through apps: All, Favorites, Media, Games and BlackBerry Bridge (the latter only appears if you have Bridge enabled).

There's no support for folders, although you can rearrange icons and uninstall apps directly from the home screen the same way you would under iOS.

App launches are unfortunately a bit high latency. Select an app and you'll first see it launch as a thumbnail, then zoom in and finally run full screen. The whole process takes a couple of seconds but it feels longer than firing up similar iOS or Honeycomb apps.

Above the app grid is the multitasking UI, although you need to have at least one active app to see it in action:

Multitasking is smooth and well executed on the PlayBook. To switch between active apps just swipe left to right (starting from the left or right bezel, inner-screen swipes are application specific). You can also swipe up from the bottom bezel (the unlock gesture) while you're in an app to bring up a horizontal list of thumbnails of currently running apps. When in this thumbnail view you can swipe left to right to scroll through the list of apps, flick up (or hit the x) to quit apps and tap on a thumbnail to select and switch to an app. It's all clearly very webOS inspired, although I will say that webOS still feels a bit better in this regard.

Apps continue to run while you're deciding what to switch to. For example, if you're playing a video the player thumbnail will continue to animate while you select your next app. Only once you've selected that app will the video player pause.

RIM also gives you the option to control how background apps behave. By default background apps are paused once you switch away from them, however you can set them to keep running all the time or pause immediately upon activating the task switcher.

Scrolling through running apps is (for the most part) very smooth, with the UI running at 60 fps. The multitasking UI is extremely well done and honestly one of the most impressive parts of the PlayBook experience.

Notifications

With no email or calendar apps, the PlayBook doesn't have a whole lot to notify you of. Presently the only notifications the PlayBook will deliver have to do with remaining battery capacity.

Notifications on the PlayBook work by coloring a corner of the screen (I've seen this happen in both the upper left and upper right corners) if you're in a full screen app. Use the peek gesture to reveal the status bar and you'll see a little icon representing the app that spawned the notification. As I just mentioned, the only notifications that exist today are from the OS telling you that your battery is low but ultimately you'll see notifications from other first and third party apps here.

PlayBook's notification system is clearly a work in progress. Currently if you're charging a fully discharged PlayBook you'll get a notification every 1% between 0 and 6% telling you that the battery is low as you charge it. Also the only notification color supported today is red, which works well for "hey you're running out of battery life!" but not so well for "hey you just got 3 emails".

The notification system on the PlayBook has the potential to be decent. I expect that RIM will tweak the notification system over the coming months to accommodate other applications and services using it. The foundation is solid and RIM seems to be listening to feedback so I have hope for this working well.

There's also a notification LED on the front of the PlayBook, to the left of the front-facing camera. Today all it does is glow red when you turn on the PlayBook, but you can eventually expect it to have more BlackBerry-like functionality as RIM rolls out other things that can notify you (think emails).

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