Any testing or observation of battery life to date by anyone outside of RIM would have been performed using pre-beta units that were built without power management implemented. RIM is on track with its schedule to optimize the BlackBerry PlayBook’s battery life and looks forward to providing customers with a professional grade tablet that offers superior performance with comparable battery life.
MacDailyNews Take: The thing could have 24-hour battery life and there’d still be no good reason to buy it.
[RIM] must move beyond their area of strength and comfort into the unfamiliar territory of trying to become a software platform company. I think it’s going to be a challenge for them to create a competitive platform and to convince developers to create apps for yet a third software platform after iOS and Android. With 300,000 apps on Apple’s App Store, RIM has a high mountain ahead of them to climb.
One naturally thinks that a 7-inch screen would offer 70% of the benefits of a 10-inch screen. Unfortunately, this is far from the truth. The screen measurements are diagonal, so that a 7-inch screen is only 45% as large as iPad’s 10-inch screen. You heard me right: Just 45% as large.
If you take an iPad an hold it upright in portrait view and draw an imaginary horizontal line halfway down the screen, the screens on these 7-inch tablets are a bit smaller than the bottom half of the ipad’s display. This size isn’t sufficient to create great tablet apps in our opinion. While one could increase the resolution of the display to make up for some of the difference, it is meaningless unless your tablet also includes sandpaper, so that the user can sand down their fingers to around one quarter of their present size.
Apple has done extensive user testing on tough interfaces over many years and we really understand this stuff. There are clear limits of how close you can physically place elements on a touchscreen before users cannot reliably tap, flick, or pinch them. This is one of the key reasons we think the 10-inch screen size is the minimum size required to create great tablet apps.
Every tablet user is also a smartphone user. No tablet can compete with the mobility of a smartphone; its ease of fitting into your pocket or purse, its unobtrusiveness when used in a crowd. Given that all tablet users will already have a smartphone in their pocket, giving up precious display area to fit a tablet in their pockets is clearly the wrong tradeoff.
The 7-inch tablets are tweeners. Too big to compete with a smartphone and too small to compete with an iPad.
Our potential competitors are having a tough time coming close to iPad’s pricing, even with their far smaller, far less expensive screens. The iPad incorporates everything we’ve learned about building high value products from iPhone, iPods, and Macs. We create our own A4 chip, our own software, our own battery chemistry, our own enclosure, our own everything. And this results in an incredible product at a great price. The proof of this will be in the pricing of our competitors’ products which will likely offer less for more.
These are among the reasons we think the current crop of 7-inch tablets are going to be DOA. Dead On Arrival. Their manufacturers will learn the painful lesson that their tablets are too small and increase the size next year, thereby abandoning both customers and developers who jumped on the 7-inch bandwagon with an orphaned product.
Sounds like lots of fun ahead. – Apple CEO Steve Jobs, October 18, 2010
You just have to love how SJ goaded the likes of RIM. Now they are stumbling all over themselves trying to compete with Apple and prove SJ wrong. It is pitiful when you have to send out e-mails defending a product not yet in the marketplace. STFU and get the product refined and then announce it. Gad, what pawns.
“built without power management implemented”
What!?! So those promotional videos of the PlayBook, showing off its speed are unthrottled, to drum up interest? Shouldn’t they show a disclaimer, “the speed you are about to witness is simulated”.
RIM’s PlayBook will be left for dead by the time it gets to market in 2012 or whatever. While the retards at RIM spend time polishing a turd, Apple will have released a live working version of iPad 2 that will move the technology forward from iPad 1.
The only good thing about the PlayBook will be as a proof of concept that corporations favor e-mail security over other considerations. RIM will be fighting a losing battle against the versatility of the iPad and the number of apps that actually makes the device a joy to use.
RIM has about as much chance of success with the PlayBook as a Canuck will have winning camel races in the sands of Arabia.
I can optimize the Playbook for them—just remove Flash!
So when will Apple roll out a secure email system? That would be the final nail in the coffin for RIM…
I’m no fan of RIM (recently got my wife to dump her BlackBery for an iPhone 4)
but what RIM is saying about a pre-beta makes since. Assuming they are not just spinning a real problem.
I’m sure RIM will give us plenty to complain about once it is released.
Sent from my (new/Christmas) iPad!
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I’m with KenC on this one. You’re telling me the demos have had no power management?!
And another thing, is power management something you can just bolt on at the end? I doubt it … seems like the way you’d have to do THAT would be to ask the processor to do less, which means degrading the performance.
Anybody here familiar with power management? Can it really be added at the end like a seasoning?
“We create our own A4 chip, our own software, our own battery chemistry, our own enclosure, our own everything.”
Steve gives them the obvious “secret” and they still follow the road most traveled! iDiots, they are!
RIM in negotiations to purchase Energizer Bunny’s secret formula.
I thought QNX had battery optimization built in. Oh well, once they cripple their hardware, I guess battery life will come up.
It just goes to show you proper R&D is a MUST!! You just can’t sit around waiting for the next big thing and expect that you can easily be competitive in that market.
Basilliedinejad !!!
Hummm… I thought Canadians were actually smarter than average, generally, but it seems like they actually need the same lessons in PLAYBACK of digital recordings or of ANYTHING that gets posted on computers in one place being available in other places.. amazing how that whole network thing works…
So RIM – HERE – is saying “No worries about battery life – we’re fine and even better than everyone else”… Well, take a brief moment to go half-way around the planet (sure better than flying) and get the word – on the SAME SUBJECT – from say, the Australians..
You’s see the following headline “BlackBerry PlayBook may be tossed due to poor ‘two to four hour’ battery life”… curious how that’s EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE what RIM are saying in this hemisphere… WHO’S LYING???
http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/tablets/blackberry-playbook-may-be-tossed-due-to-poor-two-to-four-hour-battery-life-20101230-19ai1.html
so what is the Playbook’s battery life?
Note Rim’s latest missive doesn’t say it.
If it was so great shouldn’t they come out and say it like Apple did when it announced the iPad?
Until Rim comes out and say something like “running xyz number of Flash pages in the background while doing abc processing — since it keeps touting ‘full flash’ and ‘full multitasking’ and it’s battery beats the iPad” it’s crock.
Note in the interview with Mossberg Rim CEO tried to avoid answering then hinted that Playbook OS QNX is not suited for phones (which led to speculation it’s a power hog).
(what critics don’t get is that Apple’s products are so great because of ideal balance: optimum battery vs weight vs performance vs usability. I saw one article touting a ‘gaming pc laptop’ as being more powerful than a macbook pro but failing to mention it weighed almost 2 pounds heavier… )
Apple scaled down the software of the full-sized computer to create (first) iPhone and (then) iPad. RIM and the Android bunch are scaling UP a PDA-class software to create… a bigger PDA.