A 2 Z Tablet PC

RIM’s Tablet OS, which is making its debut on the BlackBerry PlayBook ($499-$699, 2.5 stars), has good bones, but for now, it’s skeletal—and it’s critical to the future of the company. This operating system is nothing like the previous BlackBerry OS, and it will share many of its components with the upcoming BlackBerry 7 for smartphones. The user interface of the QNX-based OS looks great, but it’s missing basic apps, and currently suffers from a confusing SDK strategy.

There’s plenty of potential and a lot of good news here, though. This OS is light years ahead of the 1990s-era Java environment you see on current BlackBerry phones. And this isn’t Symbian, which is so barnacled with the encrustations of the past that it can’t move forward. This is a beginning.

To a great extent I’m reminded of Mac OS X 10.0, of iOS 1.0, and, more recently, of Android 1.0. The first version of Apple’s now-established desktop OS introduced a new kernel, just like this OS does, and had to run earlier apps in a virtual machine just like this OS will. It was horribly unstable, and couldn’t play DVDs or burn CDs, which were big-deal features in 2001. iOS 1.0 didn’t even support apps. Android 1.0 didn’t include a video player or recorder, didn’t support stereo Bluetooth, and didn’t support Microsoft Exchange.

RIM has said this operating system is part of a decade-long plan, and the company is bringing it to phones in late 2011 or early 2012. In today’s intensely competitive tablet and smartphone market, though, will there be time to catch up? For now, here’s where RIM’s new OS stands.

The QNX Core and Integrated Apps
The new BlackBerry Tablet OS is based on QNX Neutrino, a microkernel-based, Unix-like OS that is particularly good at distributing multiple threads over multiple cores or processors. Apple’s Darwin, the foundation of both Mac OS X and iOS, is also a Unix-like microkernel OS. The OS supports POSIX APIs, putting it firmly in the family of modern mobile operating systems. The QNX OS is primarily used in embedded applications, most notably in cars, like GM’s OnStar and BMW’s ConnectedDrive programs.

On top of the QNX core, RIM has layered a UI with portions contributed by another one of its acquisitions, Swedish design firm TAT. The company snapped in the WebKit browser it acquired from Torch Mobile, and the excellent Microsoft Office-compatible suite it acquired from Dataviz. Everything these three companies brought to the table looks good in the OS. Performance is smooth. Multitasking is a specialty.

The user interface is new, while still evoking some BlackBerry 6 elements like the drawer of app icons collected into groups with a status bar on top. All-new, of course, is the almost webOS-like parade of minimized windows on the top third of the screen. The Web browser is stellar. It renders pages perfectly and has the best Adobe Flash support I’ve seen on any mobile platform.

Overall, the interface is very well implemented. Icons are big and colorful, animations are smooth, and the metaphor of swiping in from the PlayBook’s bezel works well to minimize apps or switch between windows. Useful utility icons and notices float up in a status bar at the top of the screen.

The core OS feature I’m worried about here is memory management. QNX handles true multitasking, letting multiple apps live on as long as they want. But this version of BlackBerry Tablet OS doesn’t seem to do a good job paging inactive apps out to virtual memory, resulting in “out of memory” errors when you load too many apps at once. That should be avoided.

The base OS package comes with a browser, DataViz’s office suite, photo, video and music players, BlackBerry App World, RIM’s own music store, a podcast client, Bing Maps, and several other apps.

But the BlackBerry PlayBook is missing critical apps that should be part of any mobile OS package. There’s no e-mail app, and the third-party SDK has no way to send e-mail messages. E-mail will be enabled by a clunky “BlackBerry Bridge” app which will require a tethered BlackBerry phone. Basic PIM is also missing; there’s no contact book and no calendar. There’s no IM and no social networking either.

We got a beta version of BlackBerry Bridge, but it was severely limited, and I’m against the whole idea. Consumers and businesses expect tablets to be standalone devices. A tablet shouldn’t require a second device to run basic applications.

Like earlier BlackBerries, devices with the new OS are supposed to sync with PCs and Macs using BlackBerry Desktop software, which can sync media and PIM information to various BlackBerry devices. That functionality, alas, wasn’t working when we tested it before the PlayBook’s official release.

The OS has built-in support for Cisco and Checkpoint VPNs, which is great. But enterprises are going to want to use this as a standalone device on Wi-Fi-enabled corporate campuses. Secure messaging is RIM’s specialty. Heck, the company has been banned from entire countries because its secure messaging is of such high quality. There’s no excuse for the lack of built-in, secure messaging and contact apps here.

The SDK and Third-Party Apps
As one of the world’s biggest proponents of Java, RIM is very comfortable with virtual machines. Maybe they’re too comfortable, because the Tablet OS development strategy relies on a dizzying number of different development paths. I’m concerned that RIM’s “we’ll support everything” tack will lead to a proliferation of low-quality apps, or to developers avoiding this platform for mobile OSes with a clearer path.

The recent launch of the Motorola Xoom ($599.99-$799.99, 3.5 stars) marked the debut of Google’s Android 3.0, nicknamed Honeycomb—the first Android OS designed for tablets. In the coming weeks, the Xoom will get plenty of company in Honeycombland, and the T-Mobile G-Slate with Google (by LG) is the first to arrive. The G-Slate is the first 4G-ready tablet, and it features a 3D-capable screen—it can even record in 3D. Throw in dual-facing cameras, video chat, a fast chip set featuring the Nvidia Tegra 2 dual-core processor, and Flash support, and the Motorola Xoom, which lacks 3D features and is still awaiting a 4G upgrade, has some serious competition. The Apple iPad 2($499-$829, 4.5 stars), however, is still, by far, the best tablet available.

Before we move on, here’s a quick look at the pricing for the 32GB G-Slate. The device itself costs $529.99—if you mail in the $100 rebate you get when you buy the tablet and a qualifying two-year agreement, that is. But it’s $629.99 up front. It should be noted that the 16GB iPad 2 with either AT&T or Verizon is the same cost—$629—but there is no $100 rebate, and it has half the storage. So, yes, it’s cheaper than the comparable iPad 2 configuration. That said, the plans are a bit different. For customers with T-Mobile phones, there’s a 200MB plan for $23.99 a month, a 5GB Overage Free plan for $39.99 a month, and a 10GB Overage Free plan for $67.99 a month. Those same plans for customers without T-Mobile phones are $29.99, $49.99, and $84.99 a month, respectively, and all three plans allow for Wi-Fi sharing on up to five devic

Design & File Support
The G-Slate measures 9.6 by 5.9 by 0.5 inches and weighs 1.3 pounds. It looks a lot like the Motorola Xoom, the first Honeycomb tablet to hit the market, but it’s a bit smaller in height when held horizontally—and it weighs 0.3 pounds less. Its 8.9-inch, 1,280-by-768-pixel touch screen is framed by black glossy plastic, and is smaller than the Xoom’s 10.1-inch, 1,280-by-800-pixel display. Both offer slightly better than 720p in a roughly 16:10 format. Interestingly, there’s no logo on the front panel, which is nice—the T-Mobile, Google, and LG logos are emblazoned on the matte black back panel, which has a smooth, rubberized texture. The side panels house stereo speakers and a Power button, 3.5mm headphone jack, and power adapter connection on the left-hand panel. The lower panel houses the micro-USB and micro-HDMI outputs, as well as magnetic charging dock connectors. Volume controls and a microphone are situated on the top panel.

The front-facing, 2-megapixel camera is strangely located in the upper-left corner on the front panel when holding the G-Slate horizontally—more on that, and the dual rear-facing lenses for 3D video and 5MP images, in a bit. Next to the front lens are two tiny dots—one is an ambient light sensor and the other an LED indicator. The back panel features an accessible compartment for the SIM card. The G-Slate ships with zany red-and-blue 3D glasses, a micro USB sync cable, a micro USB to standard USB adapter, and a power adapter.

Internally, the G-Slate has the 1GHz NVIDIA Tegra 2 dual-core processor—the same powerful chip used in the Motorola Xoom. Like most tablets these days, the G-Slate also has a built in accelerometer for auto screen orientation adjustment, and a gyroscope.

The G-Slate can access 3G/4G networks on T-Mobile’s U.S. band and popular foreign frequency bands, but not AT&T’s 3G band, so don’t try to unlock it and use it with AT&T. When you’re out of 3G range, it will have good 2G coverage in the U.S. on our 850 and 1900 MHz bands, but lacks one of the two bands used abroad – GSM 900 – so its 2G coverage won’t be ideal elsewhere. This should all be fine for occasional roaming, we just don’t advise trying to import G-Slates for permanent use overseas. The G-Slate supports Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR.

As for file support, the G-Slate loads and plays MP3, AAC, AAC+, eAAC+, MPEG4, WAV, and MIDI for audio; 3GPP, H.263, H.264, MPEG4 for video files; and JPEG, GIF, BMP, and PNG for photos.

Android 3.0 (Honeycomb)
Our test unit shipped with Android 3.0.1, the same version running on the Motorola Xoom. The user interfaces, however, differ slightly. It’s mainly about minor tweaks that feel like they were done with Google’s blessing: shipping with a different default desktop, screen saver theme, and initial layout of the apps and browser shortcuts on your desktop. But this is window dressing, and minimal at that—the Xoom and G-Slate are running identical operating systems; they have all the same fonts and on-screen controls. When synced to the same Gmail account, they get the same updates and notifications at the same time.

Honeycomb gets a lot of the little things right—like a great multitasking view bar, and excellent notifications for email and calendar. These are implemented better than Apple’s iOS, but the iPad’s overall OS experience remains smoother and easier to organize. Even the RIM BlackBerry PlayBook ($499, 2.5 stars)—maligned for shipping without enough necessary features intact—has a less cluttered, more easily-navigated user default interface (though most of the Honeycomb screens can be customized). So, Honeycomb gets the small stuff right, but here’s hoping the next tablet OS from Google tones down the unnecessarily busy home screen(s) and simplifies things like Apple and RIM have done.

Google’s Honeycomb, also known as Android 3.0, is poised to become the standard tablet operating system for much of the world. That’s not a statement about how good it is; it’s the only OS being offered to a wide range of tablet manufacturers, so we’re going to see dozens of Honeycomb tablets come to market in the coming months.

As it is now, Honeycomb is an emptier vessel than its major competitors, Apple’s iOS 4.3 (4 stars), RIM’s BlackBerry Tablet OS (3 stars) and HP’s upcoming version of WebOS for tablets. Honeycomb’s extreme configurability demands more of users, but it can pay off with a tablet that’s designed for your needs in a way no other OS can match. The OS is severely weak on third-party apps, though, which may be a brake on Honeycomb tablet sales, at least for a while.

History and Devices
Honeycomb is poised to appear on more tablets than any other OS because of Google’s strategy of offering its OS to many different manufacturers. We’ve seen Honeycomb tablets from big mobile phone makers like LG, Motorola, and Samsung, but also from smaller firms like Anydata and from PC giants like Acer and Asus. This is a very different approach from competing tablet OS vendors Apple, RIM, and HP, who make their own hardware and keep the numbers down to one or two per year.

This version of Android isn’t open source, at least not yet; Google seems to be doling it out only to partners it trusts, with a promise to open it up in the future. Once it becomes open source, expect dozens of cheap Honeycomb tablets to appear quickly.

Google swears there’s no hardware requirement for Honeycomb, but the first round of devices have all been 8.9-inch or larger tablets with 1280-by-1024 screens and Nvidia Tegra 2 processors. Manufacturers tell us Honeycomb will also be available on 7- and 10-inch devices, on tablets with 1024-by-600 screens, and on HTC’s upcoming EVO View 4G for Sprint, which has a 1.5GHz, single-core processor. So just as with Android phones, we’re likely to see a wide variation in Honeycomb tablet capabilities.

Honeycomb is considered Android 3.0, with most features in common with Android phones. Honeycomb won’t run on small-screen devices, Google has said, but the tablet and phone experiences may be brought together in the next version of Android, which is code named “Ice Cream” and expected later this year.

The upgrade path for Honeycomb tablets is unclear. While all the Honeycomb tablets so far have had the same Google user experience, which would in theory make software upgrades easy, Google and its manufacturers don’t have a strong history of providing timely upgrades on Android phones, so we’re wary of what will happen with these tablets.

Just like other versions of Android, Honeycomb is a modern Linux-based OS which uses the Dalvik virtual machine to run code similar to Java apps. It supports multitasking and just-in-time compilation, and generally has good memory management; I didn’t run out of memory when trying to run multiple apps during my tests. Stability, on the other hand, was a concern. While my test Honeycomb devices, a T-Mobile G-Slate (3.5 stars) and a Motorola Xoom (3.5 stars), didn’t crash while I was testing them, they frequently threw up errors asking me to close misbehaving background apps.

Home Screens
Unlike Android phones, all Honeycomb tablets so far have the same user interface. They have different built-in apps depending on their wireless carrier and manufacturer, though, and they may also have different optional widgets that consumers can choose to add or remove on home screens. The first Honeycomb “skins,” changing the UI and home screens, are poised to arrive this summer from Samsung and HTC.

Honeycomb tablets come with five, user-configurable home screens. Typically, the central home screen has some app icons preloaded; the others are blank. This can be a very spare user interface for newbies, but Google intends you to decorate it as you like.

This is Honeycomb’s strength and its weakness. There’s an overwhelming number of elements you can add to a Honeycomb screen. You can add widgets, many of which are live, like a little box showing your most recent e-mail messages, or the weather. Third-party apps add widget options as well, such as news headlines or media players. You can add links to apps, Web bookmarks, individual contacts, shortcuts to settings screens, or even music playlists. No other tablet OS comes anywhere close in terms of configurability. You can make a Honeycomb tablet look unique to an extent no Apple tablet can match. But until you spend time doing it, and until more third-party developers come out with apps and widgets for Honeycomb tablets, you’ll have a lot of blank screens.

On a top bar, above the home screen, there’s a Google search bar, a voice-commands button, and buttons to add widgets and open the “apps drawer.” The apps drawer looks like the home screen of a BlackBerry or iOS tablet: it’s the list of apps. It’s collected into two groups, all apps and “My Apps,” which is the programs you’ve downloaded. There’s no support for folders or custom groups. (You can create groups by arranging icons on your custom home screens.)

Just like on Android phones, that search bar is a universal search, giving you results both from the Web and from within your device. That’s a great advantage of Android, and one way Google is ahead of Apple right now.

Along the bottom of the screen are virtual Back and Home buttons, a button that pops up a list of most recently used apps (with great-looking thumbnails), various notifications and a digital clock that, when touched, pops up a settings panel and list of notifications.

Notification strategy here is better than other tablet OSes. Any app running in the background can notify you of news at any time, through an icon in the bottom bar. The notifications aren’t annoying, they don’t interrupt what you’re doing and they can be dismissed, unlike on an iPad.

Features and Performance
Honeycomb hits all the basic apps you’d expect from a tablet. The built-in contact, calendar, and e-mail apps look good, especially the calendar app, which supports pinch-to-zoom and displays entries from different calendars in different colors. All the PIM apps use the now-standard tablet method of having an index pane on one side of the screen, and more detailed information on the other side.

Honeycomb’s Web browser uses the same WebKit core that is standard on high-end mobile devices nowadays, but it has a big problem. Many major sites seem to see it as a cell-phone browser, delivering low-quality, text-only pages that aren’t ideal for tablet-size screens. In my tests, Expedia.com and RadioShack.com, for instance, turned up a stripped down version in Honeycomb. I didn’t have that problem with the iPad or BlackBerry Playbook.

In terms of performance, the browser supports Adobe Flash 10.2, a good thing in the long run, but at the moment, it’s a buggy beta version. On an LG G-Slate, the browser was slower to load and render pages than either the PlayBook or the iPad. Of course, that may also be due to hardware differences.

Honeycomb makes an initial step towards merging multiple user accounts, but doesn’t go far enough. Right now, the OS supports Microsoft Exchange contacts, calendar, and e-mail; Google for the same functions; POP/IMAP e-mail and Twitter contacts. Many Android phones also support Facebook contacts and calendar, which would be a useful addition.

Media support is fine, with popular (non-DRM) audio and video formats supported. The music player shows album art and a Cover Flow-like 3D view. The video player is oddly named “Gallery” and makes you drill through thumbnails of mixed music and videos, but it plays most expected formats as well. XVID and DIVX support, on phones, were added by manufacturers rather than in the core Android OS, so keep an eye on specific device reviews if you need those file formats.

Other built-in apps include a calculator, the Google Books e-reader app, a desk clock, Google Maps with free GPS driving directions, YouTube, and Google Talk with video chat (but it only works with other Honeycomb tablets and PCs, for now), although software loads vary by device.

This being Android, one of the big advantages is that you can download a range of third-party Web browsers, music and video players. For instance, the Dolphin HD Web browser doesn’t have the mobile-site-display problem, while the doubleTwist media player has a more-appealing interface than the Android Gallery. Third-parties can extend the Honeycomb touch keyboard, too, adding features like Swype or XT9 text-entry. Once more, Honeycomb is the most configurable mobile OS.