A lot of functionality in a small form

Out of the box, RIM's first tablet — BlackBerry PlayBook — looks like a digital photo frame with its bezel. Picking the tablet up, it has a dense feeling. It's definitely heavier than it looks, though weighing in at less than a pound. The most important thing on this tablet is its operating system. It is built upon the QNX architecture and RIM has packed a lot of punch into the PlayBook's 7-inch form factor. The basic homescreen experience is pretty straightforward — the choice is All, Favourites, Media and Games. Unlike Apple OS or Android, there's no home button on the screen. The edges of the bezels are touch-sensitive, allowing gesture-based navigation. Once you have worked it out, you can move swiftly, and the speed with which you can jump between running applications is noticeably faster than anything else out there. A 3-megapixel forward-facing camera and 5-megapixel camera on the back are both capable of recording 1080p resolution. There's no flash, but the photos and recording are pretty decent even in low-ish light. Article continues below Centred along the top edge of the device are the volume up/down buttons which have a play/pause button sandwiched in the middle. The buttons are quite small and can be irritating. To the left of the media buttons lie the power button, which between being tiny and mounted flush to the device makes it extremely annoying to use. Along the bottom edge of the BlackBerry PlayBook are three ports. In the middle is a microUSB port for syncing to a computer and charging. On the left is the HDMI output port which fits a microHDMI connector. Curiously, the device doesn't support USB mass storage. There's no Gorilla glass on the PlayBook, so while the glass does appear to be pretty tough you'll want to take care of it. Compared to Apple's 4:3 screen ratio, the PlayBook is 16:9 ratio. The capacitive touch screen has 1024x600 resolution which makes it very bright and crystal clear with support for multiprocessing. Running the show is a dual-core, 1GHz processor backed by 1GB of RAM. The OS and native apps eat up about 1.3GB of space, meaning you can expect a 16GB PlayBook to have 14.7GB of free storage out of the box. I think the web browser is the main memory-eating culprit. The PlayBook shows 680.6Mb of RAM of the total 1GB. For people who own both a BlackBerry Smartphone and a BlackBerry PlayBook, the BlackBerry Bridge provides a set of additional apps on the PlayBook that allow you to interact with BlackBerry Smartphone via Bluetooth. Overall, the selection in App World and on the device itself is rather limited at the moment. As the icing on the cake, RIM incorporates full Adobe Flash 10.2 support into the PlayBook's browser. With day-to-day usage, WiFi on, screen reasonably bright, checking out some websites and playing some tunes, the PlayBook lasts for seven hours with 5300 mAh capacity battery. However, even in standby mode, the PlayBook is prone to running out of charge.