Midwest IT Survival

Initial Foray into Tablet Computing

In keeping up with my personal trend of being an early technology investigator yet a late technology adopter, I finally made the leap into tablet computing. After following the blogosphere cover the literal explosion of tablets onto the consumer and corporate market, I finally decided I needed to try and commit to integrating a tablet into my daily computer using habits. After getting my spouse a Kindle Fire as a Christmas gift in a response to her request for an ebook reader and helping her get it setup, I knew I would have to make a product selection for myself. I immediately got the sense in handling the Kindle Fire that today’s tablet fits a computing need I really didn’t know I had. That need, for me, is filling the gap between when one is logistically barred from one’s primary desktop computer and yet equally inconvenient to fire up the laptop/netbook to access Internet content. And so, this week arrived a RIM Blackberry PlayBook to my door.

What? A PlayBook? Isn’t RIM the mobile incumbent vendor that has let the market pass them by.

Yes, thus permit me a few minutes to explain … here goes: I use a Blackberry Curve mobile phone with quite some time still left on my service contract and find the tethering option to access the Internet via my personal netbook invaluable in my effort to keep my personal computing pursuits completely separate from my full-time professional demands. In my mind, having a security related position ratchets up the need to fully and completely embrace all policies and standards surrounding using company resources for only company business. Thus, when I researched the tight integration between the PlayBook and Blackberry phones, that became a plus for me.

My primary intention for the tablet is for consumption of Internet hosted, primarily written, content. In other words, I’m not really interested in playing games or watching movies or even outright purchasing ebooks. These interests don’t seem to constrain anyone to any particular tablet manufacturer but RIM has been focused on the corporate user, rather than consumer to their suggested demise, and with the addition of having a strong security framework around mobile computing, I drifted towards the PlayBook with that in mind.

Then came the “fire sale” and the prospective of having a corporate designed tablet device with 64gb of storage originally priced at $699 for $299. It seems unclear as to RIM’s specific motivations for such deep discounting of a product that has taken a beating in the media since being announced last year right before a major upgrade (OS 2.0) next month (Feb. ’12). Add RIM’s significant investment in this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES ’12) showing continued investment in the PlayBook product and picking up a discounted PlayBook, still a gamble, owning one could be intriguing.

Learning that OS 2.0, from folks brave enough to install the development beta version, will include the ability to run native PlayBook apps as well as Andoid apps, thus even if RIM is unable to gain significant leaps in market-share and corresponding development investment to enrich the product’s capabilities, the product should benefit from enabling the Android Marketplace as a source of additional usefulness.

All things considered, the price point is what really pushed me over the edge to make the purchase. If RIM continued to leave the PlayBook 16gb entry level point at $499 I am pretty certain I would still be researching the vast tablet landscape.

So, after a few more days of use, I’ll post my initial experience of how tablet computing and the PlayBook specifically is working out for me.

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