Is the Playbook better than the Nexus 7..how?

[Saiga]

I don't think I can help you then. Hey let me know how that YouTube + Pandora experiment works out for ya.

If you don't understand it by now, I guess enjoy task switching.

 

[Mechinikel]

I don't think I can help you then. Hey let me know how that YouTube + Pandora experiment works out for ya.

If you don't understand it by now, I guess enjoy task switching.

Oh, I'm sorry, I stopped reading your post after I saw your nasty, arrogant first sentence.

Excuse me that I have no experience with the Playbook and came here to ask a question...

There's always gotta be a few of those people...

 

[Saiga]

Sorry, but my first sentence wasn't meant as being nasty or arrogant. That was a question. You know like "Did you not see the pics I posted?" honestly wasn't trying to be nasty or anything lol. I only asked because, If you hadn't seen the pics, I was going to refer you to them. Because those pics were examples of RIM's new OS multitasking Android apps better than Android itself can. I answered you as if you were someone completely new to the PlayBook. That's why I went into so much detail. Was honestly just trying to help.

 

[natehoy]

Yes, I saw them, so what?

My question still stands.

The picture showed multiple simultaneous FOREGROUND applications, all sharing screen space with each other. The Playbook is capable of running multiple simultaneous copies of Android as separate standalone virtual machines. That's multitasking taken to a whole new level.

As I said before, the geek factor is severely high on that one. It's freakin' VMWare for Tablets. I saw the picture and my brain asploded.

On the other hand, though I can run multiple simultaneous Android instances, cool as that is, it's not really a feature I am looking for in a tablet, and it comes with too many compromises (limitations on app availability being a major one).

But I can see a case for the Playbook doing certain things, like true multitasking (not running background processes, running multiple FOREGROUND processes), in ways that Android may never be capable of. Android would need more than a one-app-at-a-time windowing model, for starters.

Not things I care much about, mind you, but they are there and for those who care about such things, they are useful.

 

[Saiga]

I saw the picture and my brain asploded.

Lol, that cracked me up. It's not everyday you get to say you made someone's brain asplode with a screen shot.

 

[natehoy]

Lol, that cracked me up. It's not everyday you get to say you made someone's brain asplode with a screen shot.

Now I'm thinking "SCREEN SHOT!" in the "Unreal Tournament" announcer voice. LOL.

But, yeah, I haven't looked at the Playbook for a while, they came out with it shortly after my company announced that our Blackberries were getting the boot and I didn't see any point in a Playbook without a Blackberry companion, so I skipped it. I saw that screenshot and my jaw dropped. VM Multitasking... on a tablet. (brain asplodes again)

 

[badbrad17]

We have to look at the complete package to even compare, which is impossible.
If you could get a PB for $100 so you could surf the web and play videos for your kids it could be a bargain, but it wouldn't be in the same league and any Android of Apple Tablet in any way.

 

[BlastTyrant]

...and the Nexus 7 with one and a half Android apps running at once.

This is one of the most unintelligent statements ever posted. Seriously. Why do you think even mid-level Droid phones have 7 homescreens? Nexus 7 can run can run as many simultaneous apps as you can stand to keep track of.My phone can run 12+ at once, and the Nexus is more capable...


Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I727 using Android Central Forums

 

[glamrlama]

One word... no
O
Rim is a dying company and IMO only bleeding heart fanatics still like them.

I have always hated blackberry/rim products because I always thought they tried to hard to only appease one group of people... the business sector. All of their products look like old PDAs and are almost all geared toward business/professionals. IMO rim doesn't design products that an average every day user would want to buy.

Sent from my SPH-L710 using Tapatalk 2

Sorry but Playbook looks and acts nothing like the BlackBerry handsets or as you term them old PDAs. Personally I like the term PDA much better than Smartphone or tablet. I'm not a fanatic or bleeding heart fanboy. I needed/wanted a tablet and I did my homework and did my research. I chose Playbook. 10 months in and what do I want? Another Playbook.

If Nexus 7 does what you need/want then rock it hard. If not there are many many other options and PB is a good one to consider.

 

[natehoy]

This is one of the most unintelligent statements ever posted. Seriously. Why do you think even mid-level Droid phones have 7 homescreens? Nexus 7 can run can run as many simultaneous apps as you can stand to keep track of.My phone can run 12+ at once, and the Nexus is more capable...

With Go! Launcher, I can have as many homescreens as I want. 20? 40? 90? I don't even know there is a limit. And I don't care. Because it's utterly irrelevant.

I can't run more than one thing in the foreground at once. Background? Sure. Foreground? Not so much. Show me Firefox and World of Goo each running taking up half the screen. Show me those two each taking up a quarter of the screen with Facebook taking up the other half. Show me all three of them taking up a quarter of the screen each while tuning a piano with AutoTuner on 1/8 of a screen and running a level app on the other 1/8 screen. That's what the Playbook brings to the table that Android simply cannot do - Android can run plenty of things in the background. And I love that. But...

Simultaneous as in "on the screen, running side by side, at the same time" is a completely different ball game.

Don't get me wrong, I love Android, and I run Linux (the kernel upon which Android is based) at home. I jumped for joy when our Blackberries were taken away and I could finally have an Android.

But the PlayBook does have some distinct features not available on any other current tablet. Multiple Android KERNELS running simultaneously with separate memory instances and subwindowing of them is huge. Perhaps not very useful for most of us, admittedly, but it's leaps and bounds above what Android can do from a kernel management / preemptive multitasking point of view.

You can have my Nexus when you pry it from my cold, dead hands. But the geek in me, the same one who loved OS/2 over Windows 95, loves the audacity of virtual machining on a tablet platform. That takes some serious chutzpah.

 

[NordicNinja]

I had a Playbook and I have a Nexus7 and I would suggest that the N7 is a far superior device. Granted I sold my Playbook before PB OS v2 came out so I can't speak to the advances made since I sold out. I can tell you that during my time with the Playbook I often wanted to smash it on the ground or throw it out the window, this coming from a huge Blackberry fan. Needless to say the experience left a bitter taste in my mouth and is part of the reason that I made a whole hearted switch from Blackberry to Android.

My timing to switch was good because I was able to sell the PB for a half decent price all things considered (half the $800 I paid for it) due to the upcoming OS v2 which also coincided with the release of the Galaxy Nexus and ICS, shortly followed by JB and the N7, a series of events I think that everyone would agree has been the pinnacle of Android's life. Thus far I have enjoyed the Android experience and can without a doubt tell you that in my experience as a former huge Blackberry fan, the N7 is much better than the PB.

All of that being said, like one other person suggested, the swype action on the PB was kind of nice and overall the OS is fairly stable. Blackberry/PB multitasking is superior to any other mobile platform as far as I can tell (Android multitasking was a bit of a let down for me), but the native apps sucked, the web browser was atrocious, and the 3rd party apps were severely lacking.

 

[ekafara]

I had to double check the webpage address to make sure I wasn't on iMore. It's strange that Android fanbois hate the Apple fanbois when you have so much in common, jumping to conclusions with no evidence to back your argument. People should be able use different devices then others without prosecution. If you're worried why someone uses a different device you should be more worried about why it worries you. The amount of uneducated opinions in here is disgusting. If you're going to make massive accusations about something use it first, or at least go research it on the internet. Since everyone posted on here I'm going to make an assumption that they have the internet. Click on the address bar at the top, enter: Google. From there search whatever you are looking for, it's quite amazing what you can find.

/rant

Now go use whatever the hell device you want, life it too short to judge people on the phone they use.

 

[AstronomerXI]

Aside from the last sentence (I've never gone there lol), this is 100% accurate. They're justifying buying a device for an unsupported an chaotic platform.

With the new 2.x update, having a Blackberry is no longer necessary. It's a standalone device. The latest iteration only has a 32gb version, but the dual-core processor is now 1.5ghz, in-line with the i-pad but not the Nexus 7. PC connectivity is the best out there, but there is a very poor selection of apps. Device encryption is unmatched. So, a tremendous business device (really), but not so much for consumers or many enthusiasts. Build quality is excellent. I also don't own one... For now... But unlikely in the future.

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk 2

 

[Saiga]

This is one of the most unintelligent statements ever posted. Seriously. Why do you think even mid-level Droid phones have 7 homescreens? Nexus 7 can run can run as many simultaneous apps as you can stand to keep track of.My phone can run 12+ at once, and the Nexus is more capable...


Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I727 using Android Central Forums

I guess I will have to explain my unintelligent comment for you. Even though it is seriously unintelligent, you didn't seem to understand it. Kind of odd but ok.

How many apps can you interact with or use at one time. With its 12+ running apps. How many of those apps can you see running? How many of those apps can you hear running? The answer on my Nexus 7 is 1.5. I can see 1 app running and I can hear 1 app running. Making the app I hear a half. The PlayBook you can see and/or hear several apps running at once. It really wasn't that hard was it?

Please explain to me how you are using all those apps on your N7 all at once, cause that's some magically stuff right there. I'd love to see screen shots of your 12+ opened and running apps all at once. All of them just sharing that same screen space. I mean since you can run all those apps at once, I guess the YouTube + Pandora test is no problem for your N7. I sure can't do it on mine. But what do I know.

Background processes don't necessarily equate to real multitasking. You do realize that right? My PC has 84 background processes running right now, yet I only have firefox open. That's crazy man I'm using 84 programs right now. Just multitasking like a beast. LOL

 

[NordicNinja]

I guess I will have to explain my unintelligent comment for you. Even though it is seriously unintelligent, you didn't seem to understand it. Kind of odd but ok.

How many apps can you interact with or use at one time. With its 12+ running apps. How many of those apps can you see running? How many of those apps can you hear running? The answer on my Nexus 7 is 1.5. I can see 1 app running and I can hear 1 app running. Making the app I hear a half. The PlayBook you can see and/or hear several apps running at once. It really wasn't that hard was it?

Please explain to me how you are using 12+ apps on your N7 all at once, cause that's some magically stuff right there. I'd love to see screen shots of your 12+ opened and running apps all at once. All of them just sharing that same screen space. I mean since you can run all those apps at once, I guess the YouTube + Pandora test is no problem for your N7. I sure can't do it on mine. But what do I know.

Background processes don't equate to multitasking. You do realize that right? My PC has 84 background processes running right now, yet I only have firefox open. That's crazy man I'm using 84 programs right now. Just multitasking like a beast. LOL

Good post

I second this point, cached processes are NOT multi-tasking. Like I said above, PB was pretty killer at multi-tasking, I'll give it that for sure. I will also re-iterate the fact that I was somewhat disappointed when I switched from Blackberry to Android to find that Android doesn't really do multi-tasking, it does task-caching and task-switching... not multi-tasking.

I'd say that my biggest gripe with this is when you re-open the web browser only to have to sit and wait for it to refresh your last page from cache. Another annoyance is when for example I have Google Earth open with a KML loaded and if I switch away and then back, quite often I have to re-download and re-load the kml file because it gets dropped from memory. I like Android a lot, but the multi-tasking is kind of weak in my opinion. PB was quite good in that sense, but I still take N7 over PB any day.

 

[AstronomerXI]

With Go! Launcher, I can have as many homescreens as I want. 20? 40? 90? I don't even know there is a limit. And I don't care. Because it's utterly irrelevant.

I can't run more than one thing in the foreground at once. Background? Sure. Foreground? Not so much. Show me Firefox and World of Goo each running taking up half the screen. Show me those two each taking up a quarter of the screen with Facebook taking up the other half. Show me all three of them taking up a quarter of the screen each while tuning a piano with AutoTuner on 1/8 of a screen and running a level app on the other 1/8 screen. That's what the Playbook brings to the table that Android simply cannot do - Android can run plenty of things in the background. And I love that. But...

Simultaneous as in "on the screen, running side by side, at the same time" is a completely different ball game.

Don't get me wrong, I love Android, and I run Linux (the kernel upon which Android is based) at home. I jumped for joy when our Blackberries were taken away and I could finally have an Android.

But the PlayBook does have some distinct features not available on any other current tablet. Multiple Android KERNELS running simultaneously with separate memory instances and subwindowing of them is huge. Perhaps not very useful for most of us, admittedly, but it's leaps and bounds above what Android can do from a kernel management / preemptive multitasking point of view.

You can have my Nexus when you pry it from my cold, dead hands. But the geek in me, the same one who loved OS/2 over Windows 95, loves the audacity of virtual machining on a tablet platform. That takes some serious chutzpah.

Man, I still think OS/2 should have won the race. It was so superior to anything in its time.

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk 2

 

[kameleon]

I bought a playbook on day 1. It was my first tablet. I kept it up until about a month ago when I sold it to my brother who still uses blackberry. I now own an Acer a500 and a nexus7. The thing I miss about the playbook is the bezel gestures for multi tasking / app switching. Nothing I have seen on any android to date compares even remotely. The hardware was good. It handled everything I could throw at it with ease. Yes the app selection was lacking but it did everything I needed just fine. I liked that it came with docs to go premium standard. In the end I have to say you cannot compare the playbook to the nexus7 as it is apples and oranges. The playbook was designed for business users in mind, nexus7 was/is for consumers. Also for security reasons the playbook is better, hence the business tilt. But now that I don't do as many presentations and such I prefer android as I am a tinkerer. My phone is a galaxy nexus and my primary tablet is the nexus 7. The a500 is my backup and "productivity" tablet since it has a full usb port I can hook a keyboard and mouse to.

In the end it is really all about what you plan to use the device for. Business = playbook, toy/games/Web = nexus 7.

 

[a1kemist]

I know I have the choice not to continue to read this thread but really, think we can put a fork in it and call it done.

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Android Central Forums

 

[freya09]

I have both the PlayBook and Nexus 7. I agree with kameleon. If I want to play games or read books on my Nook android app, I use my Nexus 7 (not good for surfing the web though, does not support flash). If I want to play games, send emails, read books, check updates/news via Flipboard (Yes, Flipboard), watch videos online, surf the web, blog, what have you.., I use my PlayBook.

 

[seancomp]

If playbook ran a true android experience it would no doubt be much better than the nexus 7. I have both and replying from N7. The only time I use my playbook any more is when I'm connecting the HDMI to watch movies on larger screen. The blackberry ecosystem sucks big time. RIM should adopt more of the android ecosystem because they really do make nice hardware.