There’s been an equal amount of like and dislike for RIM’s upcoming foray into the tablet space, the BlackBerry Playbook. From a UI perspective it actually looks like a half decent entry into the tablet space and one that while it is definitely not a direct challenger to the iPad; it is in fact a welcome change into the space dominated by questionable Android tablets.

What has me a little confused and worried is the promise of Playbook’s extensive legacy support; especially supporting existing applications made for BlackBerry OS 6 made in Java or WebWorks. It’s one thing to support existing BB OS applications (like iOS does going from iPhone to iPad) but it’s even more dangerous to make it a selling feature that you can take the existing applications you know and love from your low resolution BlackBerry and then have them working on this completely different paradigm shifted tablet device.

I feel RIM is supporting way too many platforms and treating their new consumer device like a PC. From the looks of the specification PDF (seriously, what sort of company publishes their specs only in PDF format?) the Playbook supports Air/Flash, HTML5, Java, POSIX OS (do they mean C?), BlackBerry 6, etc etc.

Supporting that many platforms and especially supporting that many legacy platforms isn’t going to be the death of the Playbook (I for one hope it succeeds, the UI is pretty sexy) but I think it’s going to be a dent in the user experience. Users are going to through on a bunch of applications that they can get their hands on in the RIM App World and I think they are going to be confused or a put off by the weird inconsistency of the app behaviours; you’ll have some apps that feel that they depend on a keyboard or optical trackpad, you’ll have some that depend on a mouse pointer and then you’ll finally find some apps that like and handle multitouch well.

Not to bring this back to Apple but I’m glad that iOS sticks to one native platform and forces everyone to use it. With Objective C and the iOS frameworks (CoreAnimation, CoreGraphics, etc) all developers have the same way of accepting input, drawing graphics, rendering native UI controls and interacting with the “multitasking” layer. There’s even a guide from Apple on how to treat user experience in your applications.

Sadly RIM is trying to play catchup in the tablet space and to do that they are more concerned about the number of apps at launch, than the sexiness of their apps at launch. RIM needs to understand that they world has move on from accepting BB OS’s outdated UI and accept that from the homescreen to the app everything needs to look awesome.

Perth (my home town) has just received it’s first news app for the state developed by The Sunday Times (which is owned by News Ltd. -the Australian arm of News Corporation) to enable West Australians to access news on their iPads as they would normally with a traditional newspaper.

Sadly, it’s just the same old from newspaper publishers trying to carbon copy their traditional print media behaviour in digital app form and it’s noticeable right from the beginning. Starting up the app you’re stuck at the spinning wheel loading screen for a good 2 – 3 minutes. Why? Because the Perthnow app operates in edition format; one at 7am and one at 7pm. This is amazingly bizarre to me that an internet connected and basically always on device is treated to news delivered in the same way a paper boy would deliver the news the front lawn years ago. Who would of thought something as volatile and ever changing as the news has to be delivered in a edition form over the internet to a tablet?

You begin browsing around the application and discover something even more annoying that the ever patient wait for the download to finish; pre load advertisements. I am hoping that these pre load advertisements will disappear when the free trial expires but regardless I’m worried that this old school style of delivering content is just going to ruin the idea of great content (Flipboard, Zite, Our choice) for consumers who bought the iPad as the next generation content consumption device.

Everything about this app feels less like the iPad is always connected and instead feels more like the device waits for the paperboy to deliver it’s latest round of news. Every time you relaunch the app from the background it prompts if you want to replace your content and download the latest batch of news. Sorry? Are we in some sort of data shortage on my 16GB iPad or are you so modelled on your outdated brother that you need to delete any old news because the stack of newspapers is out?


As you browse more it just gets worse and worse, as you swipe back and forth between articles these will invoke the pre load advertisements ruining the flow of the iOS swiped based gestures and your ability to quickly glance at the content and move on to the next page.
Each article just feels like a newspaper article because there is no effort to make the related images interactive or at least alive on the iPad, even in the Confidential section there was 2×3 grid of photos that you couldn’t touch to zoom in. It all just feels like a PDF surrounded by a menu system and god awful advertisement “engine”.

I’d rather see newspaper team up with the people at Flipboard to get their content syndicated through their section catalogue. It just makes sense, Flipboard is a company built to design content to fit the tablet and mobile experience and newspapers are companies built to create content for the consumers; they are not designers and they clearly don’t use an iPad or any tablet on a regular occasion.

Just like most newspapers didn’t get blogs, I don’t think many newspaper houses get iPads. And they shouldn’t, it’s not their job to so why not offload their content to the marketplace of Zite or Flipboard?

Just because Apple created the in-out homescreen experience doesn't make it right & it doesn't need to be something apps adopt. But alas, apps feel that users would love it they jumped from homescreen to another just to execute the task the app is meant to truly deliver.

Never mind the wild concept of the app instantly delivering what the user wants to achieve, let's them leave to choice from 5 different options before they can actually achieve something.

Like this shopping centre app, I imagine the idea of a shopping centre app when you launch is when you need to find a certain shop. Maybe right away show a directory or a map showing where you are in the centre with an obvious search bar to quickly pinpoint your destination?

Let's be honest, how many people who go to a shopping centre care about sharing it with their friends or reading some news about a shopping centre? If you're going to try and build an experience around your shopping centre don't palm it off to a section of your app; from the moment you start the app have it all connected. You open the app with a map of the place, a convenient search bar to quickly locate places and place pins on the directory map showing where cool sales are on offer.

And don't create a homescreen if you haven't go enough icons to fill it, making it look like it's my job to somehow fill the homescreen with your pseudo apps. I was really disappointed by the switch in design by Urbanspoon to the homescreen design. You use Urbanspoon to find cool places to eat at when you're stuck or in need for something to eat; so that's what it should open with. Open with the Shake to find feature and then use the tab bar at the bottom to offer other features like search and nearby. Urbanspoon bills itself as being able to help you find places to eat it; so it's not really helping when the user has to make a decision on what do in the app before it can help you.