For me, the two most interesting products in the operating system space to look forward to are Windows 8 (due to just how different it is), and BlackBerry OS 10. BlackBerry? Yes, and it’s simple to see why. The BlackBerry Playbook, while not the most successful tablet, seems to be loved almost universally by its users, which bodes well for BB OS 10. On top of that, it’s based on QNX, which is some major brownie points right there. The company has released information on which resolutions the operating system will support.
First of all, I’m actually happy the company isn’t moving towards full-touch all the time. The QWERTY candybar form factor – perfected by RIM – is definitely largely being ignored by Android (let alone iOS and WP7), and while it’s personally not my cup of tea, I know a lot of people who prefer it to this very day. The same applies to the QWERTY slider, by the way, but slightly less so. I don’t want all phones to look the same.
In any case, BlackBerry OS 10 will run on both full touch devices and QWERTY devices. This could be problematic for application developers, since they have to take into account two completely different resolutions and device types. Especially if you take into account RIM’s often old school approach to device portfolio (more devices = better), this could be a potential disaster.
Luckily, RIM is aware of this. “We’ve listened, we’ve learned, and we are now telling you that moving forward new smartphones will be standardizing on the following screen resolutions which will allow you to design your applications to fit two main form factors,” the company’s Tim Neil announced. It’s going to be 1280×720 (for touch devices) and 720×720 (for QWERTY devices). Definitely a boon for developers.
However, they’re not really focussing on just these two resolutions. In a classic inexplicable move, the company’s first BlackBerry OS 10 device will have a resolution of 1280×768, the same as the Dev Alpha device some developers have been having access to. “This first BlackBerry 10 device has been in the works for quite some time now with lots of supply chain management and manufacturing tooling to bring it to launch,” Neil details, “So it’s pretty much a sealed deal.”
So, developers actually have three resolutions to deal with. Neil offers solutions for this problem, too. “Modify your application for each resolution to make use of the full resolution of the different BlackBerry 10 device screen resolutions” or “consider ‘letter boxing’ your app to 1280×720 on the first BlackBerry 10 device, leaving 24 pixels on both sides of the screen, so that you don’t have any changes to make on the next generation full touch screen resolution.”
This is illustrative of why so many companies – other than Samsung – are having difficulties competing with Apple’s iPhone. Can you imagine Apple going for the suboptimal solution just because of “chain management”? Doubly so because we’re not just talking about any phone, but the device which will essentially make or break the entire company. RIM is banking its future on this, and they are already compromising like this?
I’m still looking forward to BlackBerry OS 10, but things like this make me weary. Such a high profile release should not have compromises.
I own a Blackberry Playbook by happenstance and it is a great, great device. From using it, I have decided that I prefer a 7″ tablet to 10″, that the hdmi out is great and that the UI is much simpler and easier to use than other OSs. Slide up to close or move away an app, slide down to see its configuration.
Really simple and effective.
I say this as an Android and Meego lover. What is interesting is that there is a choice of educational content and apps not available on other app stores and it seems that what “little” there is, it is of a high quality.
So, I don´t see the need to distribute 20pixels between two corners as a deal breaker and I am hoping that Blackberry has enough success to keep them afloat, just to keep things interesting.
I definitely hope that they will allow existing playbook users to upgrade to bb10 when it is out.
100% agree. Love my Playbook, more than my iPad. And while it’s janky in movement, and typing is kinda tough, as a media device, it’s awesome. Drag pretty much anything – AVI, mpg, mkv, mp3, flac, whatever on it, it works.
$299, 64GB. Plenty of great looking apps available.
I hope we get BB10 too, because I love my Playbook, even if it’s the joke of the tablet world.
Offtopic: I own a galaxy tab 2 7.0 and totally agree on the 7 inch tablet size. Perfect for me.
On topic: i don’t understand what is the fuzz about some pixels. Modern frameworks like qt(used by bb10) or android have a layout system that is perfectly able to handle this automatically.
I came to the that mobile developers need more imagination not standard resolution. Fragmentation on this level for me is a theoretical problem affecting only bad developers.
Indeed, I can think of a few “top 10” games and apps that compromise on screen resolution using black bars, be it on Android or iOS, and no one complains or probably even notices. I don’t see it as an issue at all, unless the BB10 APIs and such make it more difficult than it should be.
Agree. I’ve only briefly experimented with other tablets, but owning a Playbook I find the UI and gestures very intuitive. Apps, well, I don’t need the huge numbers that others are clamoring for. I’d happily pay for just a dozen high quality and useful apps.
As for BB10, RIM have stated that it will be available for the Playbook as well, around the time the first BB10 devices are released. It only makes sense since the OS on the Playbook is the base for BB10. The Playbook is the initial testing ground for BB10.
Which dozen? (sure, there’s also a lot of fillers, like “apps” which could be just as well an RSS link or an audiobook, but…)
I had the chance to have a play with one in an airport electronics store; a good opportunity because I was able to compare directly with an iPad 3 and several Galaxy Tabs. I so much wanted to love it, with the QNX pedigree, and my sometimes nostalgic desire for the return of my Blackberrry and all but it was, for me, rather more “meh” than “gimme”.
Judged against the above major competition, I found the UI confusing (starting an action from beyond the screen? What’s that about? Non-intuitive, much) and the device itself physically clunky and heavy. The Galaxy Tabs won hands down (just on the initial experience).
Sorry to rain on the RIM parade but as much as I have wanted to root for them in the past, and thus see more competition in this space, you really cannot keep resting on one’s laurels as a business, and relying on the general sentiment out there that there should be alternatives to the other tablet players. That line of credit/credibility won’t last very long.
Gestures from outside the view area are actually one of the best things about the user interface.
While one might not discover that when handling someone else’s device, as a device owner this is the very first thing that is demonstrated to you (short but very nice tutorial).
Once you understand that the part around the screen is not just wasteland but actually an interactive part of the device, you almost immediately appreciate the consequences.
One such consequence is that gestures inside the applications content area will never trigger those system gestures, i.e. operating system and applications are not trying to make sense of the same input. It is either the app’s job (movement originating within the screen boundaries) or the job of the control interface (movement starting outside the screen boundaries)
This also means that those system gestures can not be broken by a faulty app.
A swipe from the bottom bevel upwards will always minimize the currently running app, a swipe from the bottom left corner inwards will always bring up the virtual keyboard, a swipe from the top left corner inwards will always bring up the status bar (e.g. for quickly switching wireless off/on).
Thanks for the explanation; if I come across another PB I will give it a further and more extensive go. Now it’s been unpacked, it makes sense that system and app gestures be kept separate.
Showing my ignorance again I suppose but has RIM trumpeted this enough as a distinctive and efficient UI difference? Why don’t I kind of know this as part of the PB ‘package’ as a potential consumer? I am no hacker but I hardly have my head buried in the sand, either. Perhaps this is the bigger problem that RIM has?
Thanks again,
Orf
Chiming in in agreement.
When using these gestures, you do not have to look at a particular part of the screen to click something. Your mind is at ease knowing that if you want to close an app, and my thumb is already near the bottom bezel, I can “just swipe” up to minimize and close. Or if I want to switch between applications, I can “just swipe” up and scroll apps, or do full scrolls.
I wish I knew what you were talking about.
Was thinking of getting a PB when it first hit stores here, but I just couldn’t justify buying a tablet (any tablet) back then.
I’ve not even seen one in action since they’re not really common over here (Singapore), but I was watching a demo reel over at Teknision’s website while searching for the Chameleon Launcher (for Android tablets), and happenened to see a demo of the PB as well.
http://www.teknision.com/
Scroll down and click on “2012 Demo Reel” and fast forward to the ~26sec mark. Is that really what the PB looks like in use? If so, that’s pretty nice, I have to say.
In that video they seem to have added som effects to make the UI look more fancy but it’s close to the playbook’s real UI.
That’s a similar system to what Nokia have on the N9 with MeeGo Harmattan – if you swipe from the edge of the glass, it’s an OS-specific gesture. If you only swipe on the screen itself, that’s an application-specific gesture. A couple of people I’ve shown this to have said similar to you, but I have to say I love it after the first hour or so of use, and it’s uniform across everything on the device so there’s no inconsistency from certain apps or screens.
I am also looking forward to the next generation of black berry devices.
I have had many issues with my android based phone, including application continuity and battery. I do not like my wife’s iPhone 4s (She liked her old 3G with the old OS better than her current 4s) because I don’t find applications stable (they do tend to crash gracefully though), it is very limited with the single button, Apple restrictions of device storage access, and the battery does not last.
I don’t know if any device now a day is going to have good battery life; but I can dream of a life with good battery life, consistent interface, stable applications, and more than the single button I love to hate on the iPhone and iPad. I was defiantly a more satisfied consumer in my BB days.
Err… so why doesn’t RIM just make the OS video driver cut off 24 pixels on either side?
The BB10 will be using RIM’s own version of QML, and QML is scalable. You don’t need those silly tricks when you have a proper toolkit.
Yes, you need to customize to 1×1 or 4/3, but other than that 720 to 768, let QML handle that.
Or alternatively to support their other toolkits, RIM could just add more useful short-cut or information menus to the larger screen.
In any case, I don’t see the any reason fuzz over this detail. There is bigger problems for RIM with getting an ecosystem going, and no reason to bring up imaginary problems.
Edited 2012-08-17 08:03 UTC
I came close to getting a Playbook, got a Nexus 7 instead. It came down to support in the end. Which one had the apps I need regularly, and which one was looking likely to have continued support. But, what really sealed the deal was seeing the Nexus 7 side by side with the playbook. The latter just looked chunky and old school for some reason. Loving 7″ though. Totally.
I got the Playbook after trying to open teamcoco.com videos on many platforms. The Playbook opened videos similar to how desktops behave, and played them in the background while I switched to another app. Other tablets either would not open the videos or took a very long time to start.
No idea what Team Coco is, but if it relies on flash – that might be your issue.
“BlackBerry 10 Community Edition”
…”from now on, we resolve to hire executives who will focus on actually running the company, instead of spending all their time trying to buy a hockey team.”
Oh, wait, they mean screen resolutions?