Apps and Development - The BlackBerry PlayBook Review

Apps and Development

Everyone loves to repeat Apple's iOS app number verbatim: "65,000 iPad apps and counting" was the talking point after the iPad 2 launch event. In reality, that's hundreds of times more than the number of apps you'll actually use on a regular basis. Most of the really popular apps are cross platform, at least when it comes to iOS and Android. There are definitely iOS exclusives just as there are Android exclusives, perhaps more of the former than the latter but ultimately I don't put too much weight on quantity of apps. If there's something in particular you want that doesn't exist for one platform but does for another, that's worth talking about.

The PlayBook app experience, at least on day one, unfortunately isn't anywhere near that of what you get on Honeycomb. So if you felt that Honeycomb was under-supported by 3rd party apps at launch, the PlayBook will disappoint you.

Let's first talk about App World - RIM's app catalog on the PlayBook. Apps are divided into categories and you can of course look at the top free, top purchased, newest and recently updated apps. I haven't encountered an app that needs updating so I'm not entirely sure how that process works yet.

Browsing for apps by category is a bit more complicated than I'd like. Each category seen in the screen below has a handful of subcategories:

I've noticed that app categorization doesn't always match up with the sub categories properly. There is of course full text search in App World, which seems to work well except that there just isn't that much to search for today.

One nice feature of the App World app is the My World page. Here you get a list of everything you've installed on the app (including size and version number) and you're given the option of deleting apps from here.

RIM also provides you with a list of apps you've deleted and gives you the option of reinstalling any of them. So if you deleted something you end up missing, you don't have to go searching for it again - it's just in the uninstalled tab in My World. Deleted/uninstalled apps don't physically reside on your device so they'll have to be re-downloaded, but the convenience is still nice.

You don't need to login with your BlackBerry ID to download free apps, but anything you have to purchase requires an authentication step.

App World is one of the few first party apps that just isn't very smooth. Animations are choppy and the whole thing just begs to be optimized. I can't stress enough how having a mixture of 60 fps and sub-30 fps frame rates on the same tablet somehow stands out more than if the device were just consistently below 30 fps.

RIM sent along a list of companies that are working on PlayBook apps, however I don't have specifics as to what they're working on or when it'll be released:

·         Adobe Connect & Lifecycle
·         Airplay
·         Atari
·         BoxTone
·         Cerner Corporation
·         Digital Chocolate
·         EA
·         eBay
·         EpixHD
·         Evernote
·         FGL
·         Fortune
·         Gameloft
·         Globe & Mail
·         HFMUS - Car and Driver magazine
·         Huffington Post
·         Loblaws
·         Mattel
·         MediaFly
·         OpenText Everywhere
·         Post Media
·         Salesforce.com - Chatter
·         ScoreMedia (ScoreMobile)
·         Slacker Radio
·         Sports Illustrated
·         Telicost (Anomalous Networks)
·         The Weather Channel
·         The Weather Network
·         Time   
·         Unity3D

In terms of developing apps for the PlayBook you really have three options: the WebWorks SDK, BlackBerry Tablet OS SDK for Adobe AIR and native C/C++.

The WebWorks SDK enables HTML5 and JavaScript based apps to run on the PlayBook, similar to what the original apps for iOS were like. The Tablet OS SDK for Adobe AIR lets you bundle and target the PlayBook with apps you've built using Adobe Flash Builder. And finally, the highest performance option is to obviously write native C/C++ targeting the PlayBook.

There is a fourth method of getting apps onto the BlackBerry PlayBook, using an as-of-now unreleased Android App Player. RIM is working on a port of Android that will run on top of QNX, abstracted from the underlying hardware/software (think VM). The Android App Player should be able to run all apps that work on Gingerbread (Android 2.3). You won't get access to the Android marketplace, developers will still have to package and send all apps to RIM for signing - but it should allow existing Android developers to avoid a full blown code re-write in order to get their apps working on PlayBook right away.

It's still far too early to see how successful this is going to be and I do have concerns about performance (the layer between QNX and Android is bound to cause a performance impact). Of course Android apps won't have direct access to hardware so things like 3D games are likely going to be too slow to work at all. It's an interesting option but I'll reserve judgement until I see it implemented in a shipping device. At this point I wouldn't assume that the PlayBook is just going to give you a great Android app experience as well as a great PlayBook experience. I think that's simply too far fetched.

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