Its almost 6 months newer than the iPad, obviously they are going to have better hardware in it. What percentage of the speed up is from the hardware alone?
Yet plenty of deniers around claiming that the test was fake.
Its almost 6 months newer than the iPad, obviously they are going to have better hardware in it. What percentage of the speed up is from the hardware alone?
While there is certainly a lot of truth to that, since they are using different OSes we can’t compare one to the other directly, so we have to look at comparative tasks between devices.
For instance, a 2GHz Atom CPU has much higher performance than the original iPhone with a 600MHZ ARM11 CPU, but I bet Safari on the iPhone opens up a lot faster than any netbook running Windows.
. Playbook. . . . iPad
Cortex-A9. . . Cortex-A8
dual core. . . single-core
1024MiB RAM. . 256MiB RAM
614,400px. . . 786,432px
The real tests will come from battery time from various usage types like watching videos and web surfing over WiFi, and from measuring lag between actions like changing an app or scrolling.
It’s possible the next IPad 2 was finalized in HW before the Playbook was known to Apple and/or may still use Cortex-A8 that has been rejiggered to be optimized further for Apple as an A4 or A5. There is nothing slow about the way the current iPad feels and the only HW feature that screams “update me” is the RAM.
PS: We can say that Apple will use the latest chips to compete directly n a few month with whatever is being demoed today, but that would shortsighted of us. We can say that Cortex-A9 has to be used because it’s newer, but we really don’t know what Apple could have done to optimize it over the Cortex-A8 at this point. We even history of Apple using HW that was deemed “out of date” while still making record sales and growing a vast user base because they worked on optimizing their HW and SW, not just make a spec sheet impressive. Examples include the EDGE only iPhone, the ARM11 used in the iPhone 3G, and the 480x320 3.5” display in the iPhone 3GS.
There is no speculating. The playbook has a faster CPU, more RAM and a newer webkit core --- of course it is going to be faster.
There is no “of course” about it, as has been explained to you before yet oddly ignored.
Let’s try an example from the beginning of this year. The Nexus One came with a 1GHz Cortex-A8, 512MiB RAM with Android 2.0 (maybe 2.1, i forget). The iPhone 3GS came with a ≈600MHz Cortex-A8, 256MiB RAM and ran iOS 3.x. Yet, the Nexus One wasn’t faster in every way than the iPhone. How can that be? OMG, they use different OSes and optimizing SW to HW can make a difference in how fast something runs, especially from a user’s perspective.
Do you really need more examples than have already been provided are you are just choosing to be ignorant of this well known fact?
Maybe you need a less “computery” example. Take a car with a 200bhp engine v. a motorcycle with a 100bhp engine. By your reckoning the car should be faster, twice as fast, “of course” because it has a more powerful engine, yet you’d be wrong because you’re failing to account for things that can hinder the machine’s performance.
There is no speculating. The playbook has a faster CPU, more RAM and a newer webkit core --- of course it is going to be faster.
Which doesn't preclude the possibility that RIM would use carefully chosen websites and tune their hardware and software for this demonstration. We also have people reporting that they can get better performance on their iPads following along at home than what is presented in the video; I suppose these people might be lying, or RIM might have "accidentally" allowed the demo iPad to be used in a less than ideal condition-- perhaps with a number of web pages or apps already resident in ram.
This isn't "fake", exactly, but if I were RIM and wanting to drum up a bit advance anticipation for my new device, what better way than to show it out-performing the reigning incumbent? And what better way to make that as impressive as possible than to make a few careful choices that emphasize the difference?
I wouldn't expect RIM to do anything too overt-- that would be disastrous if the truth came out-- but there are ways of approaching demos that play to your strengths and which don't quite cross the boundary of actually faking things.
But Steve Jobs lost more than $10 billion because of it. The emperor really has no clothes.
If money, and a vast amount of it, is the end all and be all of how you define life and happiness than that detail matters. Perhaps Mr Jobs doesn't share that view and isn't concerned with the loss.
Quote:
Originally Posted by theolein
Man, oh man, Apple fans........ What are you lot going to do when SJ's no longer around anymore?
That comment relies on the notion that you believe that Steve Jobs does everything himself, is the only person in the company with any brains and doesn't share his ideas or vision with anyone else in the company.
Which is all false. We saw Tim Cook run the company for six months while Jobs was getting his not so secret liver transplant. We see folks like Jonny Ive in the videos, on the stage. Heck Ron Johnson was called out on Mad Money as being THE mind behind Apple Retail success in selling thousands per squ foot over places like Tiffanys and Lexus.
Quote:
For my part, I think the RIM Playbook is perfect in size. The web browsing looks good, but knowing RIM they'll probably skimp on some, to them minor detail that's a show stopper for everyone else.
A lot of the judgement calls depend on the intended audience for the Playbook. IF RIM is going for their business customers that don't need all that 'fluff' of games, ebooks, movies etc, then the size and style works. If they are going for the same consumer audience as the ipad then they will possibly fail.
Quote:
I sort of wish it would outsell the iPad, even if only for a while.
It probably will. If it releases during the period when everyone is sure that the next ipad is about to come out and doesn't buy (just like what happens with the iphone every April/May)
But selling 2 to 1 or whatever to the ipad doesn't mean that in total there will be more Playbooks out there or that once the ipad 2 hits the streets the numbers of Playbook sales will stay steady. THAT will be a very watched detail.
Quote:
Apple has been losing the contact to its professional and long time supporters for a while now in favour of flavour of the month toys
Hyperbolic much. You do realize that this toy you refer to are being used by more and more companies every day. Companies that also embrace the iphone as an important, sometimes vital business tool. And some of these companies are huge names like Mercedes, Wells Fargo etc.
As for those long time supporters. Fact is that many of them have stopped supporting Apple and started believing that anything that isn't how they would do things is stupid and wrong. Rather than understanding that Apple is a business and in this to make money and that means appealing to a larger audience. An audience that doesn't necessarily need Flash on their phone, or blu-ray in their 13 inch laptop, isn't buying rack based servers etc. In light of this, I"m not sure that Apple is really bothered by losing those folks. What's the loss of a few thousand self proclaimed 'long time supporters' compared to the gain of a few million new friends with very open wallets.
Quote:
Originally Posted by samab
No, I am saying that if you look at an iphone teardown --- there are daughter boards and daughter boards and daughter boards.
And? What matters more, the hardware or how well it does what it is supposed to do. If a collection of daughter boards does the job better than some pretty single board, most folks would not be concerned.
Quote:
Originally Posted by kotatsu
I pinch and zoom all the time on my iPad as I find the text rendering on most web pages too crude and a little too small.
That's the fault of the web page, not the device.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Goocher
Flash requires brawn to be useful.
Flash requires brawn on Mac OS in part because, as even Adobe admits, it's a port and not a native program. They took the Windows version and slapped on some port code and shipped it out. THey have never and have said they never intend to right a top to bottom native Mac version because the Windows version works great so there is nothing wrong with the program. This is why Jobs called them lazy and ended up having his peeps rewrite Safari to sandbox Flash so it's issues wouldn't bring down the whole browser all the time. The newer machines have enough brute strength to deal but older machines are just a nightmare.
Jobs likely made the call to keep Flash out of iOS believing Adobe would take the same stance and method and the iDevices wouldn't have the brawn to deal.
Quote:
Originally Posted by samab
Yet plenty of deniers around claiming that the test was fake.
I wouldn't say fake but loaded.
I remember a story perhaps 2 years ago about a guy who went around making bets with family, friends, total strangers that he never lost. Because he loaded the bet to make sure he wouldn't lose. It was things like eating contests, foot races etc. He would practice first and experiment with to figure out his best conditions and since he was setting the terms of the bet he could make sure those were the conditions.
By the same, I would not be shocked if these testers found sites they knew would look bad on the ipad but not the Playbook.
QNX has always been touted as a high-performance microkernel. Last time I looked, they were doing context switches an order of magnitude faster than the nearest competitor (granted, I haven't looked in a while, but in the OS world things tend to get slower rather than faster as more features are added).
The real issue will be the GUI that RIM bolts on top of QNX. I'm pretty sure it's not the QNX Photon GUI (which was blazing fast and very small, but probably too feature lean for a consumer device).
This is exactly as I was getting at. Even though QNX is a fast microkernel, it was not designed for a typical GUI OS. Not that it can't be, but even with a microkernel design, it will get bogged down unless refined very intensely to get everything to work in balance. The way it operates can be more of a problem when extending than OS X or UNIX. As you add more components to the system, there is more to manage.
I'd be interested to see what RIM did under the hood and how they're going to handle these potential problems to keep it from getting too slow while maintaining a GUI (and other components) up to or past iOS's specs.
Let?s try an example from the beginning of this year. The Nexus One came with a 1GHz Cortex-A8, 512MiB RAM with Android 2.0 (maybe 2.1, i forget). The iPhone 3GS came with a ≈600MHz Cortex-A8, 256MiB RAM and ran iOS 3.x. Yet, the Nexus One wasn?t faster in every way than the iPhone. How can that be? OMG, they use different OSes and optimizing SW to HW can make a difference in how fast something runs, especially from a user?s perspective.
Do you really need more examples than have already been provided are you are just choosing to be ignorant of this well known fact?
Maybe you need a less ?computery? example. Take a car with a 200bhp engine v. a motorcycle with a 100bhp engine. By your reckoning the car should be faster, twice as fast, ?of course? because it has a more powerful engine, yet you?d be wrong because you?re failing to account for things that can hinder the machine?s performance.
We are also talking about Android using linux kernel, which Linus himself doesn't care to optimize for the embedded devices vs. QNX being in the embedded devices for 30 years.
You should assume that even if the Playbook has the same CPU, the same RAM and the same webkit as the ipad --- the Playbook would be faster, simply because QNX would have the expertise to optimize it for the limited resources available.
Quote:
Originally Posted by addabox
Which doesn't preclude the possibility that RIM would use carefully chosen websites and tune their hardware and software for this demonstration.
They don't even have the time to breathe, let alone tuning it for demonstration purposes.
Quote:
Originally Posted by charlituna
If money, and a vast amount of it, is the end all and be all of how you define life and happiness than that detail matters. Perhaps Mr Jobs doesn't share that view and isn't concerned with the loss.
I didn't say Jobs shared that view. I said that AI'ers who claimed that they had the foresight to buy AAPL at $6 (just because Jobs was hired) and kept their stock because they have faith in Jobs --- didn't really have a point at all.
This is exactly as I was getting at. Even though QNX is a fast microkernel, it was not designed for a typical GUI OS. Not that it can't be, but even with a microkernel design, it will get bogged down unless refined very intensely to get everything to work in balance. The way it operates can be more of a problem when extending than OS X or UNIX. As you add more components to the system, there is more to manage.
I'd be interested to see what RIM did under the hood and how they're going to handle these potential problems to keep it from getting too slow while maintaining a GUI (and other components) up to or past iOS's specs.
QNX has always been used as a desktop PC for self-hosting development --- kind of a rare thing for the embedded world.
As a Canadian, I used it in high school in the late 80's --- on a 80186.
I think a good PlayBook is good for iPad users as Apple have a 6 month lead time to consider their response via iPad 2 which I expect in April or June 2011 (just my hunch).
Unfortunately it will be so hard to compare like for like in these situations for all the reasons laid out in the comments so far.
I must admit, AIR and Java support will be useful, enabling (for example) the ability to edit Squarespace websites on a Playbook. BUT it remains to be seen if the screen is ultimately big enough to make the Squarespace CMS edit consoles usable. so it's all pointless until we can try real units. Bottom line: it's more than just raw specs that makes a device useable.
Another browsing difference is 3G. Don't you need a Blackberry phone to browse over 3G on a Playbook?
Don't you need a Blackberry phone to browse over 3G on a Playbook?
You can tether with any cell phone or mifi devices.
It's just that if you want certain enterprise function --- like group policies enforcing the playbook not keeping any data on the device, then you need to pair it with a blackberry (via bluetooth).
While I agree that ipad 2.0 would be well served with at least doubling if not quadrupling the ram and even additional storage and a faster processor, I can't help but wonder if the issue was really the ipad and not poor coding on the page in question.
As a counter, the poor coding has to be rendered by both devices.
Quote:
And Apple is NOT doing videos about how it is so much better than the other guy's stuff. Which was the real point of the comment. Saying right now X is better than Y (and thus you should run out and buy X) is pointless when X is not available and by the time it is Y could be upgraded to Z and totally smoke X.
Antennagate?
In general... No: the playbook has not been released. But here's evidence that a real physical device is being developed and for some reason it's decried as vapourware.
In Jan, iPad was also vapourware on that measure, and a good number of people were underwhelmed at that event as I recall.
I'm waiting for iPad 2.0 myself but I would be interested to see how this smaller form factor plays out in the market. It looks to me like this particular device is going to be the strongest competitor of the current crop of 7in devices.
The problem is that for the last 30 years, software lags behind hardware.
RIM CEO was already talking about the possibility of doing quad-cores yesterday at web 2.0 --- simply because QNX can. And we are talking about iOS that can't do real multi-tasking yet.
Ya' know, if you want people to respect your opinion and assertions -- you should give the "iOS that can't do real multi-tasking" fallacy a rest.
iOS has done real multitasking since the intro of the iPhone in 2007 -- otherwise, you would have to contact a server to check for phone calls, text messages, mail, etc. and wouldn't be able to play music and/or browse without disabling all the other tasks.
The fact that it doesn't do it the way you would like it to is dually noted -- as are the 100 million others who accept the iPhone with iOS multitasking as satisfying their needs!
A lot of the judgement calls depend on the intended audience for the Playbook. IF RIM is going for their business customers that don't need all that 'fluff' of games, ebooks, movies etc, then the size and style works.
The fact that it doesn't do it the way you would like it to is dually noted -- as are the 100 million others who accept the iPhone with iOS multitasking as satisfying their needs!
.
Buying device != implied satisfaction with all aspects of said device.
You should assume that even if the Playbook has the same CPU, the same RAM and the same webkit as the ipad --- the Playbook would be faster, simply because QNX would have the expertise to optimize it for the limited resources available.
Except, you conveniently overlook the fact that Apple builds the CPU, RAM, etc. on a single custom chip and removes unnecessary baggage -- then designs the iOS software to exploit the hardware.
That's why, a slower, optimized, software/hardware combination often can (and does) outperform faster software optimized for faster hardware.
Comments
Its almost 6 months newer than the iPad, obviously they are going to have better hardware in it. What percentage of the speed up is from the hardware alone?
Yet plenty of deniers around claiming that the test was fake.
Did anyone even bother to look at the hardware in the playback compared to the iPad?
http://www.engadget.com/2010/09/27/r...kberry-tablet/
Its almost 6 months newer than the iPad, obviously they are going to have better hardware in it. What percentage of the speed up is from the hardware alone?
While there is certainly a lot of truth to that, since they are using different OSes we can’t compare one to the other directly, so we have to look at comparative tasks between devices.
For instance, a 2GHz Atom CPU has much higher performance than the original iPhone with a 600MHZ ARM11 CPU, but I bet Safari on the iPhone opens up a lot faster than any netbook running Windows.The real tests will come from battery time from various usage types like watching videos and web surfing over WiFi, and from measuring lag between actions like changing an app or scrolling.
It’s possible the next IPad 2 was finalized in HW before the Playbook was known to Apple and/or may still use Cortex-A8 that has been rejiggered to be optimized further for Apple as an A4 or A5. There is nothing slow about the way the current iPad feels and the only HW feature that screams “update me” is the RAM.
PS: We can say that Apple will use the latest chips to compete directly n a few month with whatever is being demoed today, but that would shortsighted of us. We can say that Cortex-A9 has to be used because it’s newer, but we really don’t know what Apple could have done to optimize it over the Cortex-A8 at this point. We even history of Apple using HW that was deemed “out of date” while still making record sales and growing a vast user base because they worked on optimizing their HW and SW, not just make a spec sheet impressive. Examples include the EDGE only iPhone, the ARM11 used in the iPhone 3G, and the 480x320 3.5” display in the iPhone 3GS.
I love Dilbert!
Yet plenty of deniers around claiming that the test was fake.
Your formulation amounts to "some have speculated one thing yet here you are speculating another", presented as if you were making a point.
Your formulation amounts to "some have speculated one thing yet here you are speculating another", presented as if you were making a point.
There is no speculating. The playbook has a faster CPU, more RAM and a newer webkit core --- of course it is going to be faster.
There is no speculating. The playbook has a faster CPU, more RAM and a newer webkit core --- of course it is going to be faster.
There is no “of course” about it, as has been explained to you before yet oddly ignored.
Let’s try an example from the beginning of this year. The Nexus One came with a 1GHz Cortex-A8, 512MiB RAM with Android 2.0 (maybe 2.1, i forget). The iPhone 3GS came with a ≈600MHz Cortex-A8, 256MiB RAM and ran iOS 3.x. Yet, the Nexus One wasn’t faster in every way than the iPhone. How can that be? OMG, they use different OSes and optimizing SW to HW can make a difference in how fast something runs, especially from a user’s perspective.
Do you really need more examples than have already been provided are you are just choosing to be ignorant of this well known fact?
Maybe you need a less “computery” example. Take a car with a 200bhp engine v. a motorcycle with a 100bhp engine. By your reckoning the car should be faster, twice as fast, “of course” because it has a more powerful engine, yet you’d be wrong because you’re failing to account for things that can hinder the machine’s performance.
There is no speculating. The playbook has a faster CPU, more RAM and a newer webkit core --- of course it is going to be faster.
Which doesn't preclude the possibility that RIM would use carefully chosen websites and tune their hardware and software for this demonstration. We also have people reporting that they can get better performance on their iPads following along at home than what is presented in the video; I suppose these people might be lying, or RIM might have "accidentally" allowed the demo iPad to be used in a less than ideal condition-- perhaps with a number of web pages or apps already resident in ram.
This isn't "fake", exactly, but if I were RIM and wanting to drum up a bit advance anticipation for my new device, what better way than to show it out-performing the reigning incumbent? And what better way to make that as impressive as possible than to make a few careful choices that emphasize the difference?
I wouldn't expect RIM to do anything too overt-- that would be disastrous if the truth came out-- but there are ways of approaching demos that play to your strengths and which don't quite cross the boundary of actually faking things.
But Steve Jobs lost more than $10 billion because of it. The emperor really has no clothes.
If money, and a vast amount of it, is the end all and be all of how you define life and happiness than that detail matters. Perhaps Mr Jobs doesn't share that view and isn't concerned with the loss.
Man, oh man, Apple fans........ What are you lot going to do when SJ's no longer around anymore?
That comment relies on the notion that you believe that Steve Jobs does everything himself, is the only person in the company with any brains and doesn't share his ideas or vision with anyone else in the company.
Which is all false. We saw Tim Cook run the company for six months while Jobs was getting his not so secret liver transplant. We see folks like Jonny Ive in the videos, on the stage. Heck Ron Johnson was called out on Mad Money as being THE mind behind Apple Retail success in selling thousands per squ foot over places like Tiffanys and Lexus.
For my part, I think the RIM Playbook is perfect in size. The web browsing looks good, but knowing RIM they'll probably skimp on some, to them minor detail that's a show stopper for everyone else.
A lot of the judgement calls depend on the intended audience for the Playbook. IF RIM is going for their business customers that don't need all that 'fluff' of games, ebooks, movies etc, then the size and style works. If they are going for the same consumer audience as the ipad then they will possibly fail.
I sort of wish it would outsell the iPad, even if only for a while.
It probably will. If it releases during the period when everyone is sure that the next ipad is about to come out and doesn't buy (just like what happens with the iphone every April/May)
But selling 2 to 1 or whatever to the ipad doesn't mean that in total there will be more Playbooks out there or that once the ipad 2 hits the streets the numbers of Playbook sales will stay steady. THAT will be a very watched detail.
Apple has been losing the contact to its professional and long time supporters for a while now in favour of flavour of the month toys
Hyperbolic much. You do realize that this toy you refer to are being used by more and more companies every day. Companies that also embrace the iphone as an important, sometimes vital business tool. And some of these companies are huge names like Mercedes, Wells Fargo etc.
As for those long time supporters. Fact is that many of them have stopped supporting Apple and started believing that anything that isn't how they would do things is stupid and wrong. Rather than understanding that Apple is a business and in this to make money and that means appealing to a larger audience. An audience that doesn't necessarily need Flash on their phone, or blu-ray in their 13 inch laptop, isn't buying rack based servers etc. In light of this, I"m not sure that Apple is really bothered by losing those folks. What's the loss of a few thousand self proclaimed 'long time supporters' compared to the gain of a few million new friends with very open wallets.
No, I am saying that if you look at an iphone teardown --- there are daughter boards and daughter boards and daughter boards.
And? What matters more, the hardware or how well it does what it is supposed to do. If a collection of daughter boards does the job better than some pretty single board, most folks would not be concerned.
I pinch and zoom all the time on my iPad as I find the text rendering on most web pages too crude and a little too small.
That's the fault of the web page, not the device.
Flash requires brawn to be useful.
Flash requires brawn on Mac OS in part because, as even Adobe admits, it's a port and not a native program. They took the Windows version and slapped on some port code and shipped it out. THey have never and have said they never intend to right a top to bottom native Mac version because the Windows version works great so there is nothing wrong with the program. This is why Jobs called them lazy and ended up having his peeps rewrite Safari to sandbox Flash so it's issues wouldn't bring down the whole browser all the time. The newer machines have enough brute strength to deal but older machines are just a nightmare.
Jobs likely made the call to keep Flash out of iOS believing Adobe would take the same stance and method and the iDevices wouldn't have the brawn to deal.
Yet plenty of deniers around claiming that the test was fake.
I wouldn't say fake but loaded.
I remember a story perhaps 2 years ago about a guy who went around making bets with family, friends, total strangers that he never lost. Because he loaded the bet to make sure he wouldn't lose. It was things like eating contests, foot races etc. He would practice first and experiment with to figure out his best conditions and since he was setting the terms of the bet he could make sure those were the conditions.
By the same, I would not be shocked if these testers found sites they knew would look bad on the ipad but not the Playbook.
philip
QNX has always been touted as a high-performance microkernel. Last time I looked, they were doing context switches an order of magnitude faster than the nearest competitor (granted, I haven't looked in a while, but in the OS world things tend to get slower rather than faster as more features are added).
The real issue will be the GUI that RIM bolts on top of QNX. I'm pretty sure it's not the QNX Photon GUI (which was blazing fast and very small, but probably too feature lean for a consumer device).
This is exactly as I was getting at. Even though QNX is a fast microkernel, it was not designed for a typical GUI OS. Not that it can't be, but even with a microkernel design, it will get bogged down unless refined very intensely to get everything to work in balance. The way it operates can be more of a problem when extending than OS X or UNIX. As you add more components to the system, there is more to manage.
I'd be interested to see what RIM did under the hood and how they're going to handle these potential problems to keep it from getting too slow while maintaining a GUI (and other components) up to or past iOS's specs.
Let?s try an example from the beginning of this year. The Nexus One came with a 1GHz Cortex-A8, 512MiB RAM with Android 2.0 (maybe 2.1, i forget). The iPhone 3GS came with a ≈600MHz Cortex-A8, 256MiB RAM and ran iOS 3.x. Yet, the Nexus One wasn?t faster in every way than the iPhone. How can that be? OMG, they use different OSes and optimizing SW to HW can make a difference in how fast something runs, especially from a user?s perspective.
Do you really need more examples than have already been provided are you are just choosing to be ignorant of this well known fact?
Maybe you need a less ?computery? example. Take a car with a 200bhp engine v. a motorcycle with a 100bhp engine. By your reckoning the car should be faster, twice as fast, ?of course? because it has a more powerful engine, yet you?d be wrong because you?re failing to account for things that can hinder the machine?s performance.
We are also talking about Android using linux kernel, which Linus himself doesn't care to optimize for the embedded devices vs. QNX being in the embedded devices for 30 years.
You should assume that even if the Playbook has the same CPU, the same RAM and the same webkit as the ipad --- the Playbook would be faster, simply because QNX would have the expertise to optimize it for the limited resources available.
Which doesn't preclude the possibility that RIM would use carefully chosen websites and tune their hardware and software for this demonstration.
They don't even have the time to breathe, let alone tuning it for demonstration purposes.
If money, and a vast amount of it, is the end all and be all of how you define life and happiness than that detail matters. Perhaps Mr Jobs doesn't share that view and isn't concerned with the loss.
I didn't say Jobs shared that view. I said that AI'ers who claimed that they had the foresight to buy AAPL at $6 (just because Jobs was hired) and kept their stock because they have faith in Jobs --- didn't really have a point at all.
This is exactly as I was getting at. Even though QNX is a fast microkernel, it was not designed for a typical GUI OS. Not that it can't be, but even with a microkernel design, it will get bogged down unless refined very intensely to get everything to work in balance. The way it operates can be more of a problem when extending than OS X or UNIX. As you add more components to the system, there is more to manage.
I'd be interested to see what RIM did under the hood and how they're going to handle these potential problems to keep it from getting too slow while maintaining a GUI (and other components) up to or past iOS's specs.
QNX has always been used as a desktop PC for self-hosting development --- kind of a rare thing for the embedded world.
As a Canadian, I used it in high school in the late 80's --- on a 80186.
http://www.old-computers.com/MUSEUM/...asp?st=1&c=971
Unfortunately it will be so hard to compare like for like in these situations for all the reasons laid out in the comments so far.
I must admit, AIR and Java support will be useful, enabling (for example) the ability to edit Squarespace websites on a Playbook. BUT it remains to be seen if the screen is ultimately big enough to make the Squarespace CMS edit consoles usable. so it's all pointless until we can try real units. Bottom line: it's more than just raw specs that makes a device useable.
Another browsing difference is 3G. Don't you need a Blackberry phone to browse over 3G on a Playbook?
Don't you need a Blackberry phone to browse over 3G on a Playbook?
You can tether with any cell phone or mifi devices.
It's just that if you want certain enterprise function --- like group policies enforcing the playbook not keeping any data on the device, then you need to pair it with a blackberry (via bluetooth).
While I agree that ipad 2.0 would be well served with at least doubling if not quadrupling the ram and even additional storage and a faster processor, I can't help but wonder if the issue was really the ipad and not poor coding on the page in question.
As a counter, the poor coding has to be rendered by both devices.
And Apple is NOT doing videos about how it is so much better than the other guy's stuff. Which was the real point of the comment. Saying right now X is better than Y (and thus you should run out and buy X) is pointless when X is not available and by the time it is Y could be upgraded to Z and totally smoke X.
Antennagate?
In general... No: the playbook has not been released. But here's evidence that a real physical device is being developed and for some reason it's decried as vapourware.
In Jan, iPad was also vapourware on that measure, and a good number of people were underwhelmed at that event as I recall.
I'm waiting for iPad 2.0 myself but I would be interested to see how this smaller form factor plays out in the market. It looks to me like this particular device is going to be the strongest competitor of the current crop of 7in devices.
The problem is that for the last 30 years, software lags behind hardware.
RIM CEO was already talking about the possibility of doing quad-cores yesterday at web 2.0 --- simply because QNX can. And we are talking about iOS that can't do real multi-tasking yet.
Ya' know, if you want people to respect your opinion and assertions -- you should give the "iOS that can't do real multi-tasking" fallacy a rest.
iOS has done real multitasking since the intro of the iPhone in 2007 -- otherwise, you would have to contact a server to check for phone calls, text messages, mail, etc. and wouldn't be able to play music and/or browse without disabling all the other tasks.
The fact that it doesn't do it the way you would like it to is dually noted -- as are the 100 million others who accept the iPhone with iOS multitasking as satisfying their needs!
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A lot of the judgement calls depend on the intended audience for the Playbook. IF RIM is going for their business customers that don't need all that 'fluff' of games, ebooks, movies etc, then the size and style works.
It is a 7 inch tablet. It is DOA.
The fact that it doesn't do it the way you would like it to is dually noted -- as are the 100 million others who accept the iPhone with iOS multitasking as satisfying their needs!
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Buying device != implied satisfaction with all aspects of said device.
You should assume that even if the Playbook has the same CPU, the same RAM and the same webkit as the ipad --- the Playbook would be faster, simply because QNX would have the expertise to optimize it for the limited resources available.
Except, you conveniently overlook the fact that Apple builds the CPU, RAM, etc. on a single custom chip and removes unnecessary baggage -- then designs the iOS software to exploit the hardware.
That's why, a slower, optimized, software/hardware combination often can (and does) outperform faster software optimized for faster hardware.
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