Hands on with the RIM PlayBook

Friday, January 7th, 2011

RIM has surprised a few pundits by letting people get hands on with the PlayBook at CES 2011. Being a person myself, I took the opportunity to have a play and, on first inspection, it looks to be a very promising system.

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BlackBerry Bold 9780 review: first look

Thursday, November 4th, 2010

As you’ll know if you’ve read my BlackBerry Torch review, I’m a fan of RIM’s new smartphone OS, BlackBerry OS 6. Although the Torch itself didn’t get my juices flowing, the knowledge the new Bold would arrive soon, with the new UI on board, appeased me somewhat.

Well, I’ve just laid my hands on one. Alas, I’m not bowled over.

The reason? Well, there isn’t anything particularly new about it. The camera has been boosted from 3.2 megapixels to 5, the trim around the front edge has been changed from black to chrome, the RAM has been doubled from 256MB to 512MB, and … um … that’s about it.

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BlackBerry Storm 2 review: first look

Thursday, October 15th, 2009

So RIM has dumped the mechanical click screen of the original Storm completely and has replaced it with a brand new system. And having spent nearly an hour in the company of its successor – the BlackBerry Storm 2 – I can confirm that it’s a huge improvement.

The Storm 2 uses a system of four software-controlled electro-mechanical actuators (which sit behind the screen), to give a sort of localised haptic feedback. Press the screen anywhere on its surface and it gives feedback in response – but this is like no other feedback vibration I’ve experienced before. Incredibly, pressing the screen feels just like clicking a button, and it’s very responsive too.

Coupled with the BlackBerry OS’s effective auto correction, I managed to get up to a rapid typing speed instantly, and because it’s multitouch, you don’t have to wait to finish one key press before beginning another.

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First look: RIM BlackBerry Curve 8520

Tuesday, August 4th, 2009

Earlier today I got my hot hands on the RIM BlackBerry Curve 8520, and thanks to our lovely art team we’ve managed to get a few nice photos to highlight its features.

Front on, the most interesting item is slap bang in the middle: a trackpad. This works almost identically to a normal laptop trackpad, except you press it to select on an item. Opinion in the PC Pro office is so far mixed: I found it intuitive, though it’s a little fiddly as you can’t jump about the screen as quickly as I’d like, whereas our esteemed news & features editor, Barry Collins, simply couldn’t get on with it at all. (more…)

BlackBerry’s Storm goes clickety clack

Thursday, November 6th, 2008

There are times when, in an effort to outstrip the competition, a manufacturer comes up with something so left-field, we’re not sure whether it’s a good thing or not.

That’s certainly the case with the BlackBerry Storm, which we’ve just had our very first play with ahead of receiving proper review samples next week. It’s RIM’s first
touchscreen phone but that’s not the contentious thing. As we’ve highlighted in our previous news stories, the 3.25in 480 x 360 screen is not only tappable, but also clickable.

RIM is clearly attempting to steal a march on the competition. Every man and his dog has a touchscreen phone now and some are better than others but no one has yet come up with this concept. It works like this: you press the screen to highlight a button, then press the screen in to click, a bit like the trackpad on the latest Apple MacBook range.

Is this because it’s a completely mad idea? Or does it actually work? Just like the MacBook trackpad, we suspect it will have a mixed reception. In our brief tete-a-tete with the device we found navigation, especially with the web browser was something that we had to ‘get used to’ rather than something that was instantly intuitive.

We can certainly see the benefit for touchscreen typing – we’ve always found having something physical to click preferable to simply tapping away at an unresponsive plate of glass or plastic. And after a few sentences we found that “The quick brown fox…” was beginning to get up to something of a trot. We particularly liked the way the keyboard switched from full Qwerty to a 20-key predictive pad depending on the orientation of the screen, thanks to an accelerometer inside.

The software on the handsets we tested clearly wasn’t final build (it launches on the 14th, so fingers crossed), so we’ll hold off on passing judgement just now. But we’ll have a full production model very soon – keep an eye on this site for the full review.