The grapevine has it that according to a leaked Staples memo, RIM is recalling about 1,000 BlackBerry PlayBooks that is unable to properly load software upon initial set-up. This could be another addition to the PlayBook’s mounting problems.

The official line from RIM confirms the recall but mentions that many of the affected units were not yet sold to customers:“RIM determined that approximately one thousand BlackBerry PlayBook tablets (16 GB) were shipped with an OS build that may result in the devices being unable to properly load software upon initial set-up.

The majority of the affected devices are still in the distribution channel and haven’t reached customers. RIM is working to replace the affected devices.

In the small number of cases where a customer received a PlayBook that is unable to properly load software upon initial set-up, they can contact RIM for assistance.”

However the release does not give any indication what the specific fault(s) is with these tablets, but claims that any remaining PlayBooks from the list of nearly 1,000 sold “may result in a customer purchasing a unit that will not operate.” The serial numbers were provided, and it seems all are 16GB units.

The Staples memo does not list the specific issue affecting the tablet and it is also not clear if the issue is limited to BlackBerry tablets sold just at Staples.

This is not the first fault with the PlayBook; the QNX-based BlackBerry Tablet OS that came with the earlier PlayBooks were found to have some bug which were fixed with subsequent minor OS updates. All 935 serial numbers rumored for recall are available on Engadget, which broke the story.

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3. Has RIM’s BlackBerry Playbook Met an Early Demise?

Many of us have been following the latest Android Honeycomb Tablet news for a few months now, and there’s no doubt that Samsung seems to have hit it out of the park with the most desirable, most powerful, and most thin Android Smartphone, the Galaxy S II.

Can the same be said for their tablet aspirations? They quickly rose to the top of the pageview charts after making a few quick revisions to their 8.9inch and 10.1 inch tablet offerings, upon witnessing the iPad 2 for the first time, whereby they created (what were alleged to be) the world’s thinnest tablets.

Still, it’s great to know that in just a few short weeks, you will be able to pick either one of these beautifully designed tablets up.

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That’s 5,000 tablets all in all for every lucky attendee and was the announcement that received the most applause. Google has been very generous to attendees of its conferences with giveaways. The search company has previously given away Nexus Ones, HTC EVOs, Chrome OS-packed CR-48s and Motorola Xooms.

While this Tab certainly doesn’t boast anything different versus the upcoming regular black one, it’s still a nice catch. In fact, scouting eBay for I/O swag has revealed that people are more than willing to pay above market price for these goodies, with bids going for $1000 and up.

image:engadget.com

This new giveaway means that Google is now shifting gears, concentrating more on tablets as opposed to smartphones. The iPad is still, unfortunately, at the top of the heap when it comes to tablets, boasting both the marketshare and mind share to back it up. If you ask around, the iPad is what people think of when it comes to tablets, not the Galaxy Tab, Xoom or any other Honeycomb device out there.

Google also announced that it will be updating Honeycomb to 3.1 and while the Xoom is getting this early (as in right now early) the Galaxy Tab has to wait for a couple of weeks to get its due.

One of the thinnest tablets around, the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 boasts one of the largest tablet screens to date for Android and carries a dual-core 1GHz processor. Like its predecessor, it will come in 3G and WiFi-only variants and has built-in storage ranging from 16GB to 64GB. It also goes toe-to-toe with the iPad’s extremely long battery life, packing 6800mAh worth of juice. It will be available in retail on June 8.

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3. 7″inch Mid Size Tablets – are They a Phone or a Tablet?

Looking at the picture on your right, the larger device is a tablet, the smaller one an iPhone and the Samsung Galaxy Tab is the middle one. This  ’Samsung Galaxy Tab’ segment is best described as the pocketable tablets, they can easily be slipped into a gentleman’s pocket or a lady’s handbag…call it having all the goodies of a tablet in a large phone. So if tablets are gradually taking the size of phones, what then is the difference between a phone and a tablet? Especially when the Samsung Galaxy Tab for example works as a full 3G phone!

There are indeed certain similarities between the tablets and smartphones. The iPad and Android tablets run the same operating systems as their smaller cousins, and some touchscreen principles work the same across devices. But tablets have a different form, ergonomics, and context than phones. So designing for tablet takes a different perspective and, almost always, a whole new design concept.

Simply put a tablet is like a phone as a swimming pool is like a bathtub. Similar on the surface, but intended for entirely different uses. The design has to reflect that. Yet it cannot be argued that although there are clear differences between the two, it certainly becomes blurred when you see someone walking around with a Galaxy Tab to their ear having a phone conversation.

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2. Tablet Battery Life – a Quick Look At the Battery Life of some Top Tablets
3. The 2011 Tablet War – Which Tablet Will Come Out on Top?

Here is your quick guide on how the battery life on the various tablets.

• The Samsung Galaxy Tab = Touted as being capable of lasting for seven hours when a movie is played on it.
• iPad =Tests puts it between 10 to 11.5 hours of continuous video playback.
• Viewsonic ViewPad = Reported to have a battery life going up to 10 hour under moderate usage.
• Advent Vega = battery life 6.5 hours of continuous video playback
• ExoPC Slate = With a maximum of five hours of battery life, the ExoPC Slate won’t exactly be dependable on those long-haul flights or road trips.
• BlackBerry Playbook = Rumor has it that it’s up for 17 hours of continuous video playback when fully charged!
• Motorola Xoom =  Motorolapegs the Xoom’s battery life at 10 hours of video.
• HTC Flyer = Comes with a battery life of 10 – 15 hours in stand-by mode and 4 hours in video playback.
• LG Optimus = The battery can easily last for a day under moderate usage, and video playback can last for nearly 10 hours.
• HP TouchPad = Boasts 8 hours of battery life under moderate usage.
• Asus Eee Pad = Long battery life of 16 hours.  (without the dock, the battery life drops to 9.5 hours).
• Notion Ink Adam = Touted to feature at least 15 hours of battery life.
• Acer Iconia Tab = Acer says the tablet’s two 3260mAh Li-polymer batteries will provide a total of 8 hours of game-play and movie-playback time, or 10 hours of Web browsing over Wi-Fi.
• Dell Streak = With a considerably smaller battery, the Streak 7 conked out after a pathetic two hours and 10 minutes of watching movies.

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Sony S1
The Sony S1 is an Android Honeycomb 3.0 Tablet with a 9.4 inch screen. It utilises a Tegra 2 processor and will run a “Swift” web browser customization from Sony. It will feature front and rear-facing cameras, a curved back for easier holding and typing, and infrared ports to control other Sony products.

Sony S2
The Sony S2 is a 3G/4G clamshell Android device. It integrates with PlayStation Suite, allowing you to download games directly to the device. (Possibly some PS3 titles will make use of the tablets too).

Similar to Apple’s AirPlay, the S1 and S2 will integrate with Sony TVs, allowing you to control them and stream video and music over your home’s network. The tablets will interact with all your Sony entertainments systems (Bravia TVs, PS3, etc.) for streaming content and games.
The video shows a shot of the S1 running a video game and what appears to be an online media hub more movies and TV shows.
Check out the video:

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One company which looks like it will be in good steed to give Apple some competition in the tablet market is Asus. Asus’s strategy is basically trying a bunch of different stuff and seeing what we will love. Which makes a lot of business sense! They’ve got three Android tablets in their brood, so even if we have different tastes we all could still enjoy tablet goodies from father Asus.

Eee Pad Slider

This is the most interesting…really. They call it My Wave, It runs on Android 3.0 Honeycomb and has a NVIDIA Tegra 2 processor. At 10.1″ it hides a QWERTY keyboard and yet is not gigantic! It’s only half an inch thick, just about the same as an iPad but at 2.2 pounds, its a little bit heavier than the iPad. And it has got cameras on the front and back—1.2MP and 5MP with auto focus, respectively — and a mini USB port, a mini HDMI port, and a Micro SD card reader.

Eee Pad Transformer

At first glance the The Eee Pad Transformer, might look like Eee Pad Slider as it is another presto-changeo tablet, it also has the full keyboard, yet instead of sliding like the Sliders, this tablet is detachable. It comes with a Tegra 2 processor and like the Eee Pad Slider it has dual cameras (1.2MP and 5MP), and a 32GB SSD with 1GB of memory. It is reported to have a battery life of up to 16 hours…really cool!. The interesting bit about this chap is how it will pull off the pad-mode/docked-mode balancing act.

Eee Pad Memo

The first time I saw the Samsung Galaxy Tab, I asked ‘is this a phone or a tablet?’. That mostly will be the same question you will ask when you see the Eee Pad Memo as this chap is  just 7 inches. Like its elder brothers it also has 1.2MP and 5MP front and back cameras, but has a Snapdragon processor. It  can make calls and send texts with a Bluetooth MeMic accessory and it has been optimized for use with a capacitive stylus which allows us to take full advantage of things like handwriting and drawing.

The Asus Trinity strategy looks promising, but only time will tell if it will work.

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When the iPad was released by Apple, I asked myself “what was Steven Jobs thinking? Who told him we want an over-sized version of the iPhone?” But the outstanding thing about Apple is their ability to create for us a product we did not even know we wanted and make us love it after we see it! So here we are today – a happy bunch of tablet fans and lovers. When I tested the iPad for the first time, I felt it was cool but I was not sure I needed one, I had an iPhone and a Mac, what could the iPad do that these two jointly could not do and for which reason I should buy the iPad? Well, like the gadget lover that I am, I decided to wait for the dust to settle.

In as much as I admire Apple for being cool and sleek, over the years I have gradually become a BlackBerry loyalist and an addict and have stuck with BlackBerry phones for as long as I started to use smartphones, so I usually look forward to seeing the features in the upcoming version of the BB. Just when I had warmed into the iPad frenzy and was becoming inclined to buying one, Research In Motion (RIM) announced the release of its own tablet – the PlayBook (although I think it is the wrong name for the product – see my previous post on this).

As a BlackBerry loyalist, I shouted “now I will get my own tablet!” – Apple had made my heart love the tablet but BlackBerry is the blood in my veins. At that moment the choice was pretty simple…I will get the PlayBook.

The dilemma started after reading the reviews of the PlayBook , how could I buy a tablet which did not come with a default email client, did not have a calender app and not even a contacts? What was RIM thinking? So here I find myself totally perplexed and confused? Do I go in for the iPad which won my heart, or trust BlackBerry – my first love and buy the half-baked PlayBook, or wait for the next version of the PlayBook which RIM has promised will have all the expected basic features it forgot to put into the first version? Is this what Shakespeare called ‘to be or not to be’? What would you do if you were in my shoes?

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3. The 2011 Tablet War – Which Tablet Will Come Out on Top?

We all know that the heat is one and 2011 will definitely be a fiercely competitive year for tablet manufactures. There are a good number of tablets on the market with the iPad currently leading the pack by a good distance. Since 2010, we have seen several other tablets enter the market including the Samsung Galaxy Tab,Viewsonic ViewPad, Advent Vega, ExoPC Slate, BlackBerry Playbook, Motorola Xoom ,HTC Flyer, LG Optimus, HP TouchPad, Asus Eee Pad, Notion Ink Adam, Acer Iconia Tab , Viewsonic ViewPad and the Dell Streak.

I counted 13 different models in the list above….I guess you didn’t know there were so many options out there, don’t look away as there are more Android tablets scheduled for release in the coming months. But the big  question is who will this war and dominate the market? Will Apple’s iPad continue to take the number one spot by the end of 2012? Undoubtedly Apple has all it takes to continue to be number one but that does not mean it can not be upstaged and I am going to throw in my two cents on how and what can make this happen.

One Cent – Colours sell

Have you noticed that 99% of the tablets in the market are black? It reminds me of the days when we had only gray desktop computers. Apple came along and asked, why should computers be only in gray?  It sounded very simple then, but no one was creating computers in other colours, so Apple gave us different computers and that was the start of the Apple’s sleekness and suaveness…that was what made the Mac really cool.

The guys at Apple are really smart and they used the same tactic to win the portable music play war…they gave us the iPod in different colours!  So my advice to any tablet manufacturer indenting to win the war is this: Give us tablets in different colours, we are not colour blind!!!

Two Cents – physical keyboards are just cooler

I must congratulate Asus for doing this. Even before Asus had released its tablet, I just did not get it why all the other guys trying to win the tablet war had not released their tablets with a physical keyboard. I don’t know about you but I just can’t type as fast on a virtual table keypad as I can on my laptop’s keyboard…the tablet’s virtual keyboard is a back breaker!

When the laptop was first created it was given the name ‘LAPTOP’ because the guys who created it thought that we love to be typing on our laps and truly we do, but have you noticed that we prefer to put the laptop on a table rather that on our laps? We use our laps only when we do not have a table! What does this mean? Simply put, we prefer to have flatter keyboard and a forward tilting screen as we type and a virtual keyboard does not do this., it simply gives us shoulder and back pains, So my second advice to any tablet manufacturer indenting to win the war is this: Give us tablets with physical keyboards, we do not want to break our spines!!!!

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We have all heard it before ‘there’s power in a name’ and of course it is true. Companies spend a lot of time researching the best name for a product, this is done so as of have that name which will resonate with the product, connect with the customer, promote the company’s brand and of course result in increased sales.

The first time I heard the name of  RIM’s tablet, I went like ‘huh? PlayBook?, are they in to compete with Sony’s playstaion?’ One reason why a good number of people prefer the BlackBerry phone over the iPhone is simply that the BlackBerry phone is the business phone and the iPhone is the play phone, although both have the business and games capabilities and apps.

In naming its table the PlayBook, RIM failed to make use of its biggest brand assets  - the assertion that BlackBerry is the best pal of the business person. PlayBook sounds like the perfect gift for the businessman’s 18 year old son!  In short the name does not resonate with the product and does not connect with the loyal customer base that RIM has built over the years.

In recent times BlackBerry has made significant efforts to make us see the BlackBerry phone not only as  the business phone but as a play phone as well…in my personal view, this has been a sustained effort to eat into Apple’s younger generation of iPhone market. So could it have been that RIM’s intention in naming it’s table as PlayBook was to zoom straight into this market? If that is the case then should we be surprised that RIM did not included a default email client in the PlayBook, the one thing the business person can not do without? and they even left out the calender and contacts apps out too!!!– which has brought them a lot of woes – see Zohaib Ahmed’s post on RIM’s tablet woes.
Interestingly on BlackBerry’s website it describes the PlayBook as:

Work Smarter. Play harder – Built to perform, The BlackBerry PlayBook helps transform the way you work and play by combining the features you need with a powerful, ultra-portable design you want. Choose the tablet that does it all — and then some. This is what you’ve been waiting for.

In as much as RIM describes its table as a work tools, its naming of the product is totally devoid of conveying that fact…and knowing that a lot of its loyal customers love Blackberry because of it being the business person’s best pal, RIM made one big mistake. You will also notice the words ‘This is what you’ve been waiting for.‘ …true when it comes to RIM we were waiting for a work smart tablet that we can play games on as well but not a play tablet that we can work with. I guess we were waiting for Workbook not Playbook.

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