Thursday, January 31, 2013

A new BlackBerry tablet? Don't bet on it

Even the BlackBerry CEO concedes it's a tough business, and doesn't sound confident about another tablet anytime soon. A BB10 update is coming to the PlayBook though.

Don't hold your breath for a sequel to the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet.

Speaking to the press yesterday during the BlackBerry 10 launch event, CEO Thorsten Heins wasn't particularly upbeat about tablets.

"The tablet business is rather difficult," he conceded.

Indeed, the tablet market has seen a lot of entrants, but only a few winners. While Apple's iPad franchise continues to dominate, its market share is eroding to only a few players, including Google's Nexus 7, Amazon's Kindle Fire franchise, and a few of the Samsung Electronics tablets. But that doesn't leave a lot of room for a company like BlackBerry (formerly Research in Motion), which is struggling to claw its way back into the smartphone business.

"Personally, I think it's pretty futile at this point," said Jan Dawson, an analyst at Ovum. "Like Apple, (BlackBerry) really has to make its margin on the device, but it can't charge a premium like Apple."

Heins said as much when he said that he was only interested in pursuing areas that were profitable, indicating he doesn't see much money to be made in the tablet business right now.

BlackBerry, of course, had been burned pretty badly with its first tablet in April 2011. The PlayBook was a favorite project for then co-CEO Mike Lazaridis that ended up as a major embarrassment for the company when it launched. It was the first device to use the QNX operating system, which is what BlackBerry 10 is based upon, but lacked critical features such as BlackBerry Messenger and e-mail.

BlackBerry steadily updated the software for the PlayBook, filling in missing features, and heavily discounted the product, resulting in an increasing trickle of sales. The company shipped 255,000 PlayBooks in the fiscal third quarter, a paltry number by normal standards, but impressive given that the product is nearly two years old.

Heins said BlackBerry was working on a BlackBerry 10 update for the PlayBook, although he didn't specify when it would come out.

He also opened the door to BlackBerry potentially building tablets to address specific industries, but from the looks of it, those plans are just that. He talked about the potential to sell additional services to that industry.

"We want to provide a value proposition that isn't just hardware, but software too," he said.

But it's unclear whether businesses would even want to use a BlackBerry tablet, especially with tablets running Windows 8 starting to come in to the market. Despite a large presence in the business world, the company doesn't have experience catering its products for individual industries, also known as verticals.

"(BlackBerry) has no real credibility as a vertical provider," Dawson said. "It's never done anything vertical specific before and most industries can see through superficial verticalization pretty easily."

Heins is taking a look at this area because the consumer market for tablets looks even more frightening to a company in BlackBerry's position.

While Apple's core iPad continues to flourish under the $500 price point, few other tablets have seen that kind of success. The Kindle Fire made its mark with its lower price point, and the Nexus 7 likewise hit the $200 mark. The pressure from the lower-priced tablets forced Apple to offer the lower priced iPad Mini, which yields less profitability, something investors have knocked the company for.

In this environment, BlackBerry would be hard pressed to make a quality product that retails at such a low price and make money off it.

"So it's stuck between pricing at cost like Amazon and Google and effectively losing money, or charging a higher rate and therefore not selling many," Dawson said.

So if you're a hardcore BlackBerry fan looking for a tablet, the PlayBook may be your best -- and only -- bet.

Tuesday, January 8, 2013

iPad Mini Review

English: iPad 2 with Smart Cover running iMovie. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

iPad Mini Review: The Perfect Size Comes with Some Sacrifice

"What is your review? That it is an iPad, just smaller?" a colleague said to me when I first got the iPad Mini for review.
"Yeah, but the question is, is it better than the bigger iPad?" I told him.
My response may seem a bit odd since the $329 iPad Mini has some noticeable shortcomings in comparison to its larger, $499 sibling. It doesn't have the brand new and faster A6x processor or the insanely sharp Retina Display.
But don't underestimate the old cliché: size matters.
One-Handed Design

It's so cute! I'll admit that's what I thought for the first 24 hours I carried around the iPad Mini. The little tablet, with its 7.9-inch screen, is just undeniably adorable when you're accustomed to the larger version's 9.7-inch display.
Naturally, because of the smaller size, you get a lighter device; the .68-pound Mini is easier to hold for longer periods than the larger iPad. But Apple also changed the design of this .28-inch thick version and made it much thinner. (Apple's always been known to make its next generation products thinner, but it's hard to imagine how they'll achieve that with the next generation of the Mini – at least without shrinking the circumference of the headphone jack.)
However, while it is thinner and lighter than the competing 7-inch tablets out there, the 7.9-inch screen makes it wider and harder to hold in one hand. While it still fits in one hand, it doesn't sit as comfortably as the Nexus 7. That said, I prefer the aluminum build of the Mini to Android tablets with plastic or rubberlike finishes.
I also greatly prefer the smaller size of the Mini to the regular iPad. In fact, two years ago, when I reviewed one of the first 7-inch tablets – the Samsung Galaxy Tab – I said I preferred the size to the iPad for reading and even typing.
That still holds true for me. The small size of the tablet not only makes it easier to hold up when reading in bed or on a subway, but it fits better in a bag and takes up less room on the nightstand. They are small things, sure, but ones that make the tablet work better for me and don't require me to change for the tablet.
A Screen Without a Retina

But there was something I missed about the larger iPad in my testing. In fact, the only thing I missed about it in the past week has been the display. Your eyes start to become spoiled by the Retina display -- by the way it makes text, images, and video look so incredibly crisp. Reverting to another display, especially one that runs the same software, isn't easy and when you sacrifice visual clarity of text and images it can be frustrating.
That's not to say the 1024 x 768-resolution screen on the Mini isn't high quality -- you'll just notice the difference after using the Retina iPad.
And that's not my only complaint about the display. When I took the screen outside to read there was quite a bit of glare when the sun was out. After some repositioning I was able to make out text and images better on the display, though Amazon's Kindle Fire HD handled glare slightly better. Of course, this is a consistent issue with LCD screens and why E Ink Kindles and Nooks continue to be the best solution for reading books by the pool or beach. But, I'd argue that with the smaller iPad you start to want to replace your Kindle with it more and more, making the screen's shortcomings more pronounced.

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