Scenario:
- Go to electronics mega-part.
- Purchase one unit of the new crop of tablet systems.
- Go back home.
- Connect to your home/work network.
- Retrieve emails, calendar, and other information necessary to work.
- Start being productive.
What recently introduced tablet fails that test miserably?
The RIM PlayBook.
In the interest of fairness, you modify the scenario to allow for a 3G/4G account activation with a mobile telco.
Again, what recently introduced tablet fails that test miserably?
The RIM PlayBook. Again.
Why?
In what would go down as the most severe case of corporate shortsightedness since, well, the Palm Foleo, RIM “went there”!
Listen to this: the RIM PlayBook requires that it has to be connected to a RIM Blackberry in order to perform any of the tasks outlined above.
I’ll wait until your incredulous guffaws subside.
Moreover, in order to use the Folly, I mean, PlayBook, you have to tether it to your Crackberry via Bluetooth, or if your mega-telco is AT&T, you have to use a process (device?) called the ‘Blackberry Secure Bridge’.
To make matters worse, AT&T, a launch partner of RIM, has not concluded validation tests of the ‘bridge’, and is not allowing PlayBook tethering. However, I am told that you can obtain this bridge software from a third party site and install it, where it works.
Yea, like I am going to download a product called a Blackberry Secure Bridge – emphasis on secure – from a third party site to use in my business for communications.
Cue the great Everly Brothers’ song: Bye-bye senses, bye-bye security; hello stupidity. I think I just lost my network…There goes my network, of which I’ve been proud. I should be happy….
You get the message.
Some might say it is a thinly veiled attempt to protect their market share in smartphones. Nevertheless, is this the way? So today, if you want to use a PlayBook, you have to be a BlackBerry user.
I mean, seriously?
Or, to use a line from the Windows Phone 7 launch ads: “Really?”
This would have been funny, if it was a joke, cruel or otherwise, being played by the public ahead of the launch of a more sensible device.
Alas however, it wasn’t.
To make matters worse, when the co-CEOs of RIM embarked on a whirlwind tour to ‘make people understand the PlayBook’, these two guys displayed such a thin skin that they became the news, making the harsh spotlights linger on this monstrosity.
I have thought a lot about this device, and I have tried to be fair.
However, it should be apparent to everyone and man+dog that this is a half-assed attempt at a tablet, especially in its current form. It is impractical, and, basically, stupid.
Unless this is corrected quickly, RIM – the company, and the stock – will go from circling the drain from an innovation standpoint, to fading quick quickly from our consciousness.
…just like the last company to try this excrement with us: Palm. With the unlamented Foleo.
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